STEFAN ZWEIG

FEAR

TRANSLATED BY ANTHEA BELL

PUSHKIN PRESS
LONDON

FEAR

Fear

AS IRENE came down the stairs from her lover’s apartment, again that pointless fear suddenly overwhelmed her. All at once there was a shape like a black spinning top circling before her eyes, her knees froze in dreadful rigidity, and she had to catch hold of the banister rail in haste to keep herself from falling abruptly forwards. It was not the first time she had taken the risk of visiting him here, and this sudden fit of terror was by no means new to her. However much she steeled herself against it, every time she set off for home she was always subject, for no reason at all, to such attacks of senseless, ridiculous fear. The way to her rendezvous was infinitely easier. Then she told the cab driver to stop at the corner of the street, swiftly and without looking up she walked the few steps to the front door of the building where he lived, and hurried upstairs. After all, she knew he was waiting for her in the apartment, he would be quick to open the door, and her initial alarm, which had been mingled with ardent impatience, dissolved in the heat of their embrace as they met. But then, when she left to go home, that mysterious shuddering fit came over her, vaguely mingled with a sense of guilt, and the stupid delusion that every stranger in the street could tell from her face where she had been, and might add to her confusion by giving her a bold smile. Even the last few minutes that she spent with her lover were poisoned by rising uneasiness as she anticipated that sensation, and when she prepared to leave her hands were trembling with nervous haste, her mind was distracted as she heard his parting words to her, and she was quick to fend off the last lingering signs of his passion. Everything in her was anxious to be gone, to get away from his apartment building, away from her adventure and back to her placid, bourgeois world. She scarcely dared to look in the mirror for fear of the distrust in her own eyes, yet it was necessary to check that no disorder in her clothing betrayed the passion of the hour they had just passed together. Then came his last words of reassurance, but in vain, for she hardly heard them in her agitation, and she spent the final moment listening behind the safety of his door to make sure no one was going either up or downstairs. Once she was outside the door, however, her fear was waiting, impatient to take her in its grasp, and so imperiously disturbing her heartbeat that she was already breathless as she went down the first few steps, feeling the strength she had nervously summoned up fail her.

She stood there for a moment with her eyes closed, avidly breathing in the cool air in the dimly lit stairwell. Then a door slammed on an upper floor of the building, and she pulled herself together in alarm and hurried on downstairs, while her hands instinctively drew the thick veil she was wearing even closer. And now she faced the threat of that last, most dreadful moment, the terror of stepping out of the door of a building where she did not live into the street, perhaps meeting some acquaintance who happened to be passing and who might ask what she was doing here, thus forcing her, confused as she was, into the dangerous necessity of telling a lie. She lowered her head, like an athlete about to take off for a great leap, and walked fast and with sudden determination towards the half-open front door.

There she collided with a woman who was obviously on her way in. “I’m so sorry,” she said, trying to get past quickly. But the woman barred her way, staring at her angrily and at the same time with unconcealed scorn.

“Oh, so I catch you here for once, do I?” she said in a coarse voice, not at all discomposed. “That’s right, oh yes, what they call a real lady, ever so respectable! Not satisfied with her husband and all his money and that, no, not her, she has to go stealing a poor girl’s fellow too!”

“For God’s sake … what do you … You’re mistaken …” stammered Irene, making a clumsy attempt to get past. But the sturdy figure of the woman stood four-square in the doorway, and she went on abusing Irene in penetrating tones.

“Not me, no, I ain’t mistaken, I know your sort! You been with my beau, my Eduard! Caught you at last, didn’t I? Now I know why he’s got so little time for me lately … all on account of you, you nasty, horrid …”

“For God’s sake!” Irene interrupted her in a fading voice. “Don’t shout so loud!” And she instinctively retreated into the front hall of the building. The woman looked at her with derision. She somehow seemed to be enjoying Irene’s fear and trembling, her obvious helplessness, for she now examined her victim with a confident smile of scornful satisfaction. Her voice took on a louder and almost weighty tone of malicious relish.

“So that’s what them married ladies look like, them fine ladies as go stealing other girls’ fellows! Veiled, of course, ho yes, so they can carry on acting all respectable arterwards …”

“What … what do you want from me? I don’t know you at all … I have to go …”

“Yes, that’s right, go back to your fine husband, acting the lady, nice warm room to sit in, maid to undress you and all. It don’t bother your sort what the likes of us do. We could die of hunger for all you care, ain’t that a fact? The likes of you respectable ladies—you’d take every last thing we got!”

Pulling herself together and obeying a sudden if vague inspiration, Irene put her hand into her purse and took out whatever she found in the way of banknotes. “Here … here you are, take this, but now let me go. I’ll never come back here again … I swear it.”

With an unpleasant expression on her face, the woman took the money, muttering, “Bitch!” Irene flinched at the word, but she saw that the woman was standing aside to let her through the doorway, and she hurried out, a sombre, breathless figure running like a suicide about to jump off a tower. She saw faces like distorted masks passing her as she hurried on, making her way with difficulty, her vision clouded, towards a cab, a motor car standing at the street corner. She flung herself down on its upholstery, and then everything in her seemed to freeze rigid and motionless. When the driver finally, and in some surprise, asked his strangely-behaved fare where she wanted to go, she simply stared blankly at him for a moment until her confused mind finally succeeded in understanding what he meant. “Oh, to the railway station, the Südbahnhof,” she uttered hastily, and then, as it suddenly occurred to her that the woman might follow, she added, “Quick, quick, please drive fast!”

Only during the drive did she realise how badly the encounter with the woman had shaken her. She felt her hands hanging at her sides, cold and stiff like dead things, and suddenly began trembling so hard that she shook all over. A bitter taste rose in her throat, she felt nausea and at the same time a dull, unfocused fury trying to break convulsively out of her. She would have liked to scream, or lash out with her fists, free herself from the horror of the memory, which was firmly fixed in her mind like a fish hook—that coarse face and scornful laughter, the unpleasant odour of the vulgar woman’s bad breath, the coarse mouth spitting hatred and vile abuse at her, the raised red fist that the creature had shaken menacingly. Her nausea grew stronger and stronger, her gorge rose more and more. In addition, the rapid movement of the car was throwing her back and forth, and she was about to ask the driver to slow down when it occurred to her, just in time, that after giving all her banknotes to her tormentor she might not have enough money left to pay him. She quickly signed to him to stop and suddenly, to the driver’s further surprise, got out. Fortunately she had just enough money to pay what she owed. But now she found herself in a part of town that was strange to her, full of busy people pushing past, their every word and glance physically hurting her. Her knees were weak with fear, her legs unwilling to carry her on, but she had to get home, and summoning up all her energy she made a superhuman effort to walk on from street to street. It was like wading through a swamp, or walking up to the knees in snow. At last she reached her own building, and with nervous haste—although she immediately moderated it so that her uneasiness would not attract attention—she hurried upstairs.

Only now, as the maidservant took her coat, as she heard her little boy playing with his younger sister in the next room, and her glance, reassured, saw her own things all around her, her property and her security, did she recover an outward appearance of calm, although under the surface a wave of agitation was still painfully rolling through her tense breast. She took off her veil, made a strong effort of will and composed her face into a carefree expression, and then went into the dining room, where her husband was sitting at the table laid for supper and reading the newspaper.

“You’re late, my dear Irene, you’re late,” he greeted her in a tone of gentle reproof, and he stood up and kissed her cheek, arousing an instinctive and painful sense of shame in her. They sat down at the table, and as soon as he had put his newspaper aside he asked casually, “Where have you been all this time?”

“Oh … oh, I went to see Amélie … she had some shopping to do, and I went with her,” she told him, angry with her own thoughtlessness for telling her lie so badly. Usually she prepared herself in advance with a carefully invented story that could not be disproved, but in her fear today she had forgotten to devise one, and was forced into this clumsy improvisation. Suppose, she thought, her husband telephoned her friend—there had been a situation like that in the play they had seen at the theatre recently—and asked Amélie whether …

“What’s the matter? You seem so nervous … and why haven’t you taken your hat off?” her husband asked. She jumped with alarm, feeling caught out yet again in her embarrassment, stood up quickly and went to her room to take her hat off. As she did so, she stared at her restless eyes in the mirror until her glance seemed to be steady again. Then she went back to the dining room.

The maid brought in supper, and it turned into an evening like any other, perhaps rather more silent and less companionable than usual, an evening when their conversation was sporadic, listless, often stumbling. Her thoughts kept going back, and always, with a jolt of horror, came up against that moment when she was so terribly close to the woman who had threatened her. Whenever she reached that point she looked up so that she could feel safe, tenderly touching things close to her—a pleasant proximity, this time—each with its own place in the room determined by memory and significance, and she began to feel a little calmer again. And the clock on the wall, its steely pace proceeding in a leisurely manner through the silence, imperceptibly restored to her heart something of its own regular, carefree and secure rhythm.

Next morning, when her husband had gone to his chambers and the children were out for a walk, leaving her alone at last, that dreadful encounter lost much of its terror when seen in retrospect and in the cold light of day. Irene reminded herself, first, that her veil had been very thick, so that the woman could not possibly have seen her features in detail, and would never be able to recognise her again. She reflected calmly on all the measures she could take to safeguard herself. She would not on any account visit her lover in his apartment again—which surely meant that there was no imminent possibility of another such attack. There remained only the danger of meeting that woman again by chance, but that too was unlikely, for since she had made her escape in a car her assailant could not have followed her. The woman could not know Irene’s name, or where she lived, and as she would have gained only an indistinct idea of her features Irene need not fear any other kind of reliable identification. But she was armed even against such an extremely improbable case. Freed from the grip of fear, she decided at once that she would simply keep calm, deny everything, coolly claim that there was some mistake and, as no evidence of her visit to her lover could be produced except on the spot, if necessary charge the woman with blackmail. Not for nothing was Irene the wife of one of the best-known defence lawyers in the capital city; she knew enough from his conversations with professional colleagues to be aware that attempted blackmail had to be nipped in the bud immediately and in the most ruthless way, because any hesitation on the part of the intended victim, any appearance of being ill at ease, would only increase the blackmailer’s sense of superiority.

Her first precaution was to write her lover a brief letter telling him that she could not come at the agreed time tomorrow, or indeed for the next few days. On reading through her note, in which she disguised her handwriting for the first time, it struck her as rather frosty in tone, and she was about to replace the offending terms with something more intimate when the memory of yesterday’s encounter suddenly showed her that the coolness expressed in her lines was the unconscious result of lively if subliminal animosity. Her pride was injured by the embarrassing discovery that she had replaced such a base, unworthy predecessor in her lover’s affections, and reading her letter again in a more resentful mood, she felt vengeful satisfaction in the cold clarity with which it showed that her visits to him depended, so to speak, on her own good humour.

She had met the young man, a pianist of some renown in what was admittedly still a small circle, at an evening entertainment, and soon, without really meaning to and almost without realising it, she had become his lover. Nothing in her blood had really responded to him, nothing sensual, let alone intellectual, had brought her body together with his; she had given herself to him without needing or really even desiring him very much, out of a certain apathetic lack of resistance to his will, and a kind of restless curiosity. Nothing in her had made taking a lover a necessity to her—neither her desires, which were perfectly well satisfied by marital life, nor the feeling so frequently found in women that their intellectual interests are withering away. She was perfectly happy with a prosperous husband whose intellect was superior to hers, two children, contentedly and even lazily at ease in her comfortable, calm, middle-class existence. But a kind of languor in the air may arouse sensuality just as sultry or stormy weather can, a sense of temperate happiness can be more provocative than outright unhappiness, and for many women their contentment itself proves more disastrous than enduring dissatisfaction in a hopeless situation. Satiety can be as much of an incitement as hunger, and it was the very safety and security of Irene’s existence that made her feel curious and ready for an adventure. There was no opposition anywhere in her life. She met with soft acceptance in all quarters, concern for her well-being, affection, mild love and domestic respect, and without understanding that such moderation of feeling did not arise from anything outside her, but reflected an absence of deeply felt relationships, in some vague way she felt cheated of real life by her own comfort.

Her first girlish dreams of ecstasy and a great love, lulled by the calm friendship of her first years of marriage and the playful delights of becoming a young mother, were beginning to revive now that she was approaching the age of thirty. And like any woman she believed herself capable of great passion, although her desire for experience did not go hand-in-hand with the courage to pay the true price of an adventure, which is danger. When, at this time of a contented serenity that she could not enhance for herself, the young man approached her with ardent and obvious desire, entering her bourgeois world with all the romantic aura of his art around him—while other men merely paid respectful court to her, praising her as a ‘beautiful lady’, and indulged in mild flirtations without really desiring her as a woman—she felt deeply intrigued for the first time since her girlhood days. Perhaps all that really attracted her to him was a touch of grief lying like a shadow on his rather too interestingly arranged features. She was not to know that in fact it was something he had learnt, like the technical aspects of his art and the sad, thoughtful melancholy with which he would play an impromptu that he had composed in his head well in advance. To Irene, who in the usual way felt that she was entirely surrounded by the complacent bourgeoisie, this melancholy suggested the idea of a more rarefied world, one that she had glimpsed graphically depicted in books and that moved her romantically at the theatre, and she instinctively leant out past the confines of her everyday feelings to observe it. Spellbound, she paid him a compliment on the spur of the moment, perhaps expressing it more warmly than was proper. It made him look up from the keyboard at the speaker, and that first glance reached out to her. She was alarmed, and at the same time felt the pleasures of alarm. A conversation in which everything appeared to be illuminated and stoked by fires only just under the surface occupied her mind, intriguing her already lively curiosity so much that she did not avoid another meeting at a public recital. After that they saw each other quite often, and before long it was not by chance. A few weeks later, the delightful idea that she, who had never before thought highly of her musical judgement, correctly judging her appreciation of art to be minimal, meant so much to a real artist like him—for he kept assuring her that she was the one who really understood him and could advise him—caused her to agree rather too quickly when he said he would like to play his latest composition to her and her alone. The intentions behind this proposition had perhaps been half-genuine, but they were lost amidst kisses, and it ended with her surprised surrender to him. Her first feeling was one of alarm at this unexpected turn taken by their relationship, moving it into the sensual sphere. The mysterious thrill that had surrounded it was abruptly dispelled, and when her conscience pricked her for committing this unplanned act of adultery, it was only partly assuaged by the tingling sense of vanity in having for the first time defied the bourgeois world in which she lived and as she thought by her own decision. Her horror at her own wickedness, which alarmed her for the first few days, became a source of heightened pride. But these mysterious emotions too were felt at their full strength only at first. Beneath the surface, her instincts resisted this man, and most of all what was new in him, the difference that had in fact aroused her curiosity. The extravagance of his clothing, the gypsy way in which he lived, the irregularity of his financial situation, always swinging between extravagance and embarrassment, were alien to her bourgeois mind. Like most women, she wanted to see an artist as very romantic from a distance, and very well conducted in personal relationships, a fascinating beast of prey, but kept safely behind the iron bars of morality. The passion that intoxicated her in his playing of the piano made her uneasy when they were physically close; she did not really like his sudden, masterful embraces, and instinctively compared their self-willed ruthlessness with the milder ardour of her husband, who was still reticent and respectfully considerate of her even after their years together. But now that she had been unfaithful for the first time she returned to her lover again and again, without being either gratified or disappointed, out of a certain sense of duty and the apathy of habit. She was one of those women, quite often found even among the more reckless and flirtatious, whose bourgeois nature is so strong that it imposes a sense of order even on adultery; they bring an aura of domesticity into their departure from the straight and narrow path, trying in the guise of patience to transform the most unusual feelings into everyday custom. After a few weeks she had fitted her young lover neatly into her life, setting aside one day a week for him, just as she did for her parents-in-law, but in entering into this new relationship she did not give up any of the orderliness of her life, she merely, so to speak, added something to it. Soon her lover made no difference at all to the comfortable mechanism of her existence, he became, as it were, an additional source of temperate happiness, like the idea of a third child or a motor car, and her adventure soon seemed to her as ordinary as her lawful pleasures.

And now that she was called upon, for the first time, to pay the real price of danger for that adventure, she began to calculate its value in meticulous detail. Spoilt by fate, cosseted by her family, and with almost nothing left to wish for in her financially easy circumstances, she found the very first moment of discomfort too much to bear. She immediately resolved that she was not going to give up any part of her freedom from anxiety, and in fact without further ado she was ready to sacrifice her lover to her peace of mind.

His answer, a nervously disjointed letter expressing his dismay, was brought by a messenger that same afternoon. The letter, full of distraught pleading, complaints and accusations, shook her determination to end the relationship because his desire flattered her vanity. Indeed, she was delighted by his frenzied desperation. Her lover begged her, pled urgently with her, at least to grant him a brief meeting, an opportunity of explaining his offence if he had unwittingly injured her in any way. Now she was intrigued by this new game of showing that she was in a sulky mood, and making herself even more desirable to him by refusing her favours without giving any reason. She felt that she was in the midst of excitement, and like all naturally cool people she found it pleasant to be surrounded by surging waves of passion while she herself did not burn with true ardour. She arranged to meet him at a café where, she suddenly remembered, she had once had a rendezvous with an actor when she was a young girl—an episode that admittedly now seemed to her childish in its carefree propriety. How strange, she thought, smiling to herself, that romance, stunted by all these years of marriage, was beginning to blossom in her life again. By now she was almost glad of yesterday’s abrupt encounter with that woman—for the first time in a long while, it had made her feel truly strong, stimulating emotions which still left her nervous system secretly tingling, in contrast to its usual state of mild relaxation.

This time she wore a dark, plain dress and a different hat, which would lead the woman’s memory astray if they did by any chance meet again. She had a veil ready to disguise herself further, but with sudden defiance she left it at home. Was she, a respected, highly regarded woman, to be afraid to venture out into the street for fear of some female whom she didn’t know at all? There was already something curiously tempting mingled with her fear of the danger—an alarmingly pleasurable readiness to do battle, rather like caressing the cold blade of a dagger with her bare fingers, or looking down the black muzzle of a revolver where death in compressed form lurked in waiting. This thrill of adventure was not what her sheltered life was used to, and she toyed with the enticing idea of coming close to it again. The sensation exerted delightful tension on her nerves, sending electrical sparks flying through her bloodstream.

A momentary sense of fear overwhelmed her only in the first moment when she stepped out into the street. It passed through her like the nervous chill when you dip your toes into the water, before entrusting yourself entirely to the waves. But that chill lasted for only a split second, and then, all of a sudden, she felt a strange delight in life rushing through her veins. She relished the pleasure of walking along with more of a light, strong, springy step than she ever known herself to adopt before. She was almost sorry that the café was so close, for some kind of impulse was now urging her to go rhythmically on, attracted by the mysterious magnetism of adventure. But the time she had set aside for this meeting was short, and she felt in her heart, with a pleasing certainty, that her lover was already there waiting for her. Sure enough, he was sitting in a corner when she came in, and leapt to his feet in a state of agitation that she found both pleasant and painful. Such a whirlwind of heated questions and reproaches poured out of him in his mental turmoil that she had to remind him to keep his voice down. Without giving him any idea of the real reason for her failure to visit him, she played with hints so vaguely phrased that they inflamed his passions even more. She could not and would not comply with his wishes this time, she told him, and she even hesitated to make any promises, sensing how much her sudden withdrawal and refusal to give herself excited him. And when, after half-an-hour of heated conversation, she left without giving him the slightest sign of affection, or even holding out the prospect of any in the future, she was glowing with a very strange feeling that she had known before only as a girl. She felt as if a small, tingling fire were burning deep inside her, just waiting for the wind to fan it into flames that would rise and unite above her head. She was quick to notice, in passing, all the glances cast at her in the street, and her unusual ability to attract so much masculine attention made her so curious to see her own face that she suddenly stopped in front of the mirror in the window of a flower shop, to see her own beauty framed in red roses and violets gleaming with dew. She was looking back at herself with sparkling eyes, young and light at heart. A sensuous mouth, half-open, smiled at her with satisfaction, and when she walked on she felt the rhythmical movement of her limbs as if her feet had wings. A need for some physical release, a need to dance or run wildly, took over from the usual sedate pace of her footsteps, and now she was sorry to hear the clock on St Michael’s Church, as she hurried past, calling her home to her small, neat, tidy world. Not since girlhood had she felt so light at heart, with all her senses so animated. Nothing like it had sent sparks flying through her body, not in the first days of her marriage or in her lover’s embrace, and the idea of wasting this strange lightness, this sweet frenzy of the blood, on well-regulated hours seemed unendurable. Wearily now, she went on. She stopped outside the building where she lived, hesitating once again, wishing to expand her breast and breathe in the fiery air and confusion of the last hour once more, feeling the last, ebbing wave of her adventure deep in her heart.

Then someone touched on her shoulder. She turned around. “What … what do you want this time?” she stammered, frightened to death at the sudden sight of that hated face, and even more frightened to hear herself speak those fateful words. Hadn’t she made up her mind not to show that she recognised the woman if she ever met her again, to deny everything, to stand up to the blackmailer? And now it was too late.

“I been waiting here for you this last half-hour, Frau Wagner.”

Irene started when she heard her name. So the woman knew it, knew where she lived. All was lost now, she was helpless, at this creature’s mercy. She had words on the tip of her tongue, all those carefully prepared and calculated words, but her tongue was paralysed and could not utter a sound.

“Half-an-hour I been waiting, Frau Wagner.” The woman repeated her words menacingly. It was like an accusation.

“What do you want … what do you want from me?”

“Why, don’t you know that already, Frau Wagner?” Her own name made Irene jump with fright again. “You know what I’m here for right enough.”

“I haven’t seen him again … let me go! I never will see him again … never.”

The woman waited, composed, until the agitated Irene could say no more. Then she replied harshly, as if speaking to an inferior.

“Don’t you tell me no lies! I followed you to that caffy, didn’t I?” And seeing Irene flinch, she added in tones of derision, “Me, I got no job, see? They fired me from the shop on account of no work coming in, that’s what they say, and then there’s the hard times and all. Well, we got to spend our time somehow, so us poor girls go walking about a bit, just like you fine, respectable ladies.”

The woman spoke with a cold ill will that struck Irene to the heart. She felt defenceless against the naked brutality of such malice, and increasingly dizzy in the grip of the fearful idea that the woman might begin shouting, or her husband might happen to come by, and then all would be lost. She quickly felt in her muff, brought out her silver-mesh purse, and took from it all the money that her fingers could hold. With revulsion, she thrust it into the hand now slowly reaching out in certain expectation of its plunder.

But this time the strange hand did not withdraw humbly as soon as it had the money in its clasp, but stayed outstretched in the air, open like a claw.

“And let’s have that nice little silver purse too, for to keep my money safe in!” said the scornfully smiling mouth, with a soft chuckle of a laugh.

Irene looked her in the eye, but only for a second. The creature’s insolent, malicious scorn was past bearing. She felt revulsion run through her whole body like a burning pain. She had to get away, well away from the sight of that woman’s face! Turning aside, she quickly held out the purse, a valuable item in itself, to the woman, and then ran up the steps with horror on her heels.

Her husband was not home yet, so she was able to fling herself down on the sofa. She lay there as if felled by a hammer-blow, motionless apart from a frantic twitching that ran through her fingers and then up her arm, making it tremble all the way to her shoulder. But nothing in her whole body could put up any defence against the storming violence of the horror that had now been let loose. Only when she heard her husband’s voice outside did she pull herself together, making an enormous effort, and force herself to go into the next room, her movements automatic and her senses numbed.

The horror had now moved into her home and would not stir from its rooms. In the many empty hours that kept bringing the images of that terrible meeting back to her mind, wave upon wave of them, her hopeless situation became perfectly clear to her. How it could have happened she had no idea, but the woman knew her name, knew where she lived, and now that her first attempts at blackmail had been so conspicuously successful she certainly would not shun any means of making use of her knowledge to continue her campaign of extortion. She would be a burden on her victim’s life year after year, like a nightmare that no effort, however desperate, could dislodge, for although Irene was well-to-do and the wife of a prosperous man, she could not possibly raise a large enough sum to free herself of the woman once and for all without confiding in her husband. In addition, as she knew from hearing occasional stories of his about trials in which he had appeared, all agreements with base, unscrupulous persons, and any promises made to them were entirely null and void. She calculated that she could fend off the moment of doom for a month, maybe two, and then the entire artificial structure of her domestic bliss would collapse. There was little satisfaction in the certain knowledge that the blackmailer would also be brought down in her own fall. What were six months in prison for a woman who undoubtedly led a dissolute life and probably had a criminal record already, by comparison with the life she herself would lose? And she felt, in horror, that it was the only possible life for her. To begin a new one, dishonoured and with a stain on her reputation, seemed unimaginable to Irene, a woman who had received everything in her existence up to now as a gift, who had never been responsible for constructing any part of her own destiny. And then her children were here, her husband, her home, all the things that she realised only now, when she was about to lose them, were so much a part of her life, indeed were the essence of it. Everything that she had merely taken for granted in the past, touching it only with the hem of her garment, she now suddenly felt was dreadfully necessary to her, and the idea that a strange vagrant of a woman lurking somewhere in the streets might have the power to destroy its warm, coherent entity with a single word seemed more than she could grasp, and indeed as improbable as a dream.

She could not avert the disaster—she felt that now with terrible certainty; she had no way of escape. But what … what exactly would happen? She fretted over that question from morning to night. One day a letter to her husband would arrive. She could see him now, coming into the room, pale, with a sombre expression on his face, taking hold of her arm, asking questions … but then … what would happen then? What would he do? Here the pictures in her mind’s eye were suddenly extinguished in the darkness of a confused and cruel fear. She had no idea what would happen then, and her speculations plunged to dizzy, endless depths. In this brooding frame of mind, however, she saw how little she really knew her husband, how unable she was to work out in advance what his decision would be. She had married him at the urging of her parents, although with no reluctance, indeed with a pleasant sense of liking for him which was not disappointed later. She had spent eight years of comfortable, quiet contentment at his side, she had borne his children, she shared his home and had spent countless hours physically close to him, but only now that she wondered about his possible behaviour did she realise what a stranger he still was to her. Looking back feverishly at her recollections of the last few years, and feeling as if she were turning ghostly floodlights on them, she discovered that she had never wondered what his nature was really like, and now, after all these years, did not even know whether he should be described as harsh or forbearing, stern or affectionate. Stricken disastrously late by a guilty conscience which itself was engendered by her mortal fear, she had to admit to herself that she had known him only superficially, on the social level, never in that deeper part of his nature where his decision would surely be made at this tragic moment. Instinctively she began keeping an eye open for small traits of character in him, for indications, trying to remember what he had said in conversation about such cases, and she was unpleasantly surprised to realise that he had hardly ever expressed any views of his own to her. Then again, she herself had never turned to him with questions that went very deep. Now, at last, she put her mind to his life as a whole, looking for individual features that might tell her more about his character. Her fear began hammering reluctantly away at every little memory, trying to find a way into the secret chambers of his heart.

She turned her watchful attention to the slightest thing he said, and waited with feverish impatience for the times when he came home. She hardly noticed his greeting, but in his gestures—the way he kissed her hand or stroked her hair—there seemed to be an affection that might indicate a deep love of her, although it avoided any stormy demonstrations. He always spoke to her in measured tones, never impatiently or in any agitation, and his general attitude to her was one of kindly composure, yet as she uneasily began to suspect it was not very different from his manner to the servants, and certainly was less warm than his feeling for the children, which always took lively form—sometimes he joked with them cheerfully, sometimes he was passionately affectionate. Today, as usual, he civilly asked about any domestic matters, as if to give her a chance of expressing her interests to him while he said nothing about his own, and for the first time she discovered herself noticing the care with which he treated her, his reserved approach to their daily conversations—which, as she was suddenly horrified to realise, were flat and banal. He gave nothing of himself away, and her curiosity, longing for something to calm her mind, remained unsatisfied.

As he said nothing to give her a clue, she searched his face. He was sitting in his armchair now, reading a book, his features clearly illuminated by the electric light. She scanned his face as if it were a stranger’s, trying to deduce from those well-known yet suddenly unfamiliar features the character that eight years of living together had kept hidden from her indifference. His brow was smooth and well shaped, as if formed by strong intellectual effort; his mouth, however, looked stern and unyielding. Everything about his very masculine features was firm, full of energy and power. Surprised to find beauty in it, she considered that restrained gravity with a certain admiration, seeing the evident austerity of his nature which so far, in her simple-minded way, she had merely thought was not very entertaining, wishing it could have been exchanged for a sociable loquacity. His eyes, however, where the real secret must after all lie, were bent on his book, so that she was unable to consider what they told her. She could only look inquiringly at his profile, as if its curving line meant a single word portending mercy or damnation—a profile now unfamiliar, so harsh that it alarmed her, yet making her aware for the first time, in its determined expression, of its remarkable beauty. All at once she felt that she liked looking at him, and did so with pleasure and pride. Something stirred painfully in her breast as that sensation was aroused in her, a vague and sombre feeling, regret for something neglected, an almost sensuous tension that she could not remember ever having experienced so strongly in his physical presence. Then he looked up from his book. She quickly retreated further into the shadows, so that the burning question in her own eyes would not arouse his suspicion.

She had not left the house for three days. And she realised, uneasily, that the rest of the household had noticed the fact that she was suddenly spending so much time at home, for in general it was very unusual for her to stay indoors in her own apartment for many hours on end, let alone whole days. Taking little interest in domestic matters, freed from petty economic anxieties by material independence, bored by her own company, she saw the apartment as little more than a place where she briefly rested. For preference she resorted to the streets, the theatre, the lively company at social gatherings, where something new was coming in from outside all the time. You could enjoy yourself without making any great effort there; you could find much to stimulate the slumbering senses. Irene’s cast of mind made her one of that elegant set of the Viennese bourgeoisie whose entire daily timetable seemed to consist, by some tacit agreement, in the constant meeting of all members of the same secret league at the same times of day to discuss their common interests, while it gradually elevated that meeting in order to observe others, that eternal drawing of comparisons, to the entire meaning of its existence. Once isolated and thrown on its own resources, a life so used to casual social intercourse loses any fixed point, the senses rebel without their usual diet of very mild but indispensable stimulation, and solitude degenerates into a kind of nervous self-animosity. Irene felt time weighing endlessly down on her, and without her usual occupations the passing hours lost all their point. She paced up and down the rooms of her apartment as if she were in a dungeon, both idle and agitated. The street and the society world that were her real life were barred to her. The blackmailer stood there with her threat, like the angel with the fiery sword.

Her children were the first to notice this change in her, particularly the elder child, her little boy, who expressed his surprise that Mama was at home so often with embarrassing clarity, while the servants whispered to each other and exchanged surmises with the governess. Irene tried in vain to devise all kinds of necessary reasons, some of them very ingenious, for her conspicuous presence, but in itself the artificial nature of her explanations showed her how years of indifference had made her unnecessary in her own family circle. Whenever she tried to do something actively useful she came up against the interests of others, who resisted her sudden attempts as an intrusion on their own customary rights. There was no place left for her; for lack of contact with it she herself had become a foreign body in the organism of her own household. She did not know what to do with herself and her time, and even her approaches to the children failed, for they suspected that her sudden lively interest in them meant the introduction of a new kind of discipline, and she felt herself blush in shame when, during one of her attempts to look after them, her seven-year-old son asked outright why she wasn’t going for so many walks these days. Wherever she tried to lend a helping hand she was disrupting an established order, and when she showed an interest she merely aroused suspicion. And she lacked the skill to make her constant presence less obtrusive by cleverly keeping in the background and staying quietly in a single room, with a single book or performing a single task. Her private fear, turning as all her strong feelings did to nervous strain, hunted her from one room to another. She jumped every time the telephone or the doorbell rang, and kept catching herself looking out into the street from behind net curtains, hungry for other people, or at least the sight of them, longing for freedom, and yet full of fear that suddenly, among all the passing faces, she might see the one face that followed her into her dreams staring up at her. She felt that her quiet existence was suddenly disintegrating, melting away, and this sense of helplessness was giving rise to a presentiment that her life was entirely ruined. These three days in the dungeon of her rooms at home seemed longer to her than all her eight years of marriage.

However, she and her husband had accepted an invitation for the evening of the third day weeks ago, and it was impossible for her to back out suddenly now without giving very good reasons. What was more, the invisible bars of horror that had built up around her life must be broken down some time if she was not to be utterly destroyed. She needed people around her, a couple of hours’ rest from her own company, from the suicidal loneliness of fear. Then again, where would she be better protected than in a strange house and surrounded by friends, where would she be safer from the invisible persecution dogging her footsteps? She shuddered just for a second, the brief second when she actually stepped out of the house, venturing into the street for the first time since that second encounter. The woman might be lying in wait anywhere out there. Instinctively, she took her husband’s arm, closed her eyes, and quickly walked the few steps from the pavement to the waiting motor car, but then, as she sat beside her husband while the car raced through the empty nocturnal streets, the weight fell from her mind, and as she climbed the steps up to the house they were visiting she knew she was safe. For a few hours she could be the woman she had been for many long years—carefree and happy. Indeed, she felt the intensified, conscious joy of a prisoner leaving the walls of the dungeon and returning to the light of day. There was a rampart against all persecution here, hatred could not come in, everyone here loved, respected and honoured her. She saw her friends, well-dressed people who spoke to her without any ulterior motive, who were bathed in the sparkling glow of the fires of cheerfulness, performing a round dance of enjoyment that, at long last, included her again. For now, as she came in, she felt from the glances turned on her by the other guests that she was beautiful, and she became yet more beautiful through being aware of their admiration after being deprived of it. How good it felt after all those days of silence, when she had felt the sharp ploughshare of that one idea cutting fruitlessly and repeatedly through her brain, while everything in her seemed to be sore and injured—oh, how good it was to hear flattering words again! They revived her like electric sparks crackling beneath her skin, rousing her blood. She stood and stared, something was vibrating restlessly inside her, trying to get out. And all of a sudden she knew it was her imprisoned laughter that wanted to be free. It popped out like a champagne cork, pealing in musical little coloraturas, she laughed and laughed, now and then feeling ashamed of her bacchanalian high spirits, but laughing again next moment. Electricity flashed from her relaxed nerves, all her senses were strong, healthy, stimulated. For the first time in days she ate with real appetite again, and she drank like a woman dying of thirst.

Her desiccated soul, yearning for human company, was absorbing all the life and enjoyment that it could. Music in the next room tempted her, moving far into her beneath her burning skin. The dancing began, and without knowing how she found herself in the middle of the milling throng. She danced as she had never danced in her life before. The circling eddies of the dance cast all her melancholy out of her, the rhythm infected her limbs, breathing ardent movement into her body. If the music stopped she felt that the silence was painful, the snake of restlessness darted its tongue at her quivering limbs, and she flung herself back into the eddies as if into a bath of cool, soothing water that bore her up. She had never been more than an average dancer before, she was too measured, too thoughtful, too cautious and firm in her movements, but this frenzy of liberated delight did away with all physical inhibitions. A steely band of bashful circumspection that usually held her wildest passions in check now broke apart, and she was out of control, restless, her mind blissfully melting away. She felt arms and hands around her, touching and disappearing again, she sensed the breath of spoken words, the tingling of laughter, music flickering in her blood, her whole body was tense, so tense that the clothes on her back were burning, and she would have liked to tear them all off spontaneously, so that she could dance naked and sense this intoxicating frenzy even deeper inside her.

“Irene, what’s the matter?” She turned around, swaying, laughter in her eyes, still heated from the embrace of her dancing partner. Her husband’s cold, hard look of astonishment struck her to the heart. She was alarmed. Had she danced too wildly? Had her frenzy given anything away?

“What … what do you mean, Fritz?” she stammered, surprised by his suddenly piercing gaze, It seemed to be forcing its way further and further into her, and now she felt it deep inside, close to her heart. She could have cried out aloud beneath that searching, determined gaze.

“How very strange,” he murmured at last. There was a note of sombre amazement in his voice. She dared not ask what he meant. But a shudder ran through her when, as he turned away without another word, she saw his shoulders, broad, wide, strong, vigorous, attracting her gaze to the nape of his neck, which was hard as iron. Like a murderer’s, the thought flashed through her mind, a crazy thought, instantly dismissed. Only now, as if she were seeing her own husband for the first time, did she feel with horror that he was powerful and dangerous.

The music began to play again. A gentleman came up to her, and automatically she took his arm. But now everything about her seemed weighty, and the bright melody no longer brought movement into her stiff limbs. A dull heaviness moved down from her heart towards her feet, every step she took hurt. She had to ask her partner to excuse her. As she stepped back she instinctively looked to see if her husband was near, and jumped in alarm. He was standing directly behind her, as if waiting for her, and once again his penetrating eyes met hers. What did he want? What did he know? She instinctively clutched her dress together at the neck, as if her breasts were bare and she must shield them from him. His silence was as persistent as his gaze.

“Shall we leave now?” she asked anxiously.

“Yes.” His voice sounded harsh and unfriendly. He went ahead. Once again she was looking at the broad, menacing back of his neck. Someone put her fur around her shoulders, but she still felt freezing cold. They drove home in silence, sitting side-by-side.

That night she had an oppressive dream. Some kind of strange, loud music was playing, she saw a brightly lit, high-ceilinged hall, she went in. A crowd of people and many bright colours were mingled in movement. Then a young man whose identity she thought she knew, although she could not entirely place him, made his way to her. He took her arm, and she danced with him. She felt well, she was soft and yielding. A great wave of music bore her up, so that she no longer felt the floor beneath her feet, and they danced through many halls with golden chandeliers high up in the roof, radiating little flames like stars, while mirrors on wall after wall reflected her own smile again and again to infinity. The dancing grew wilder and wilder, the music more and more urgent. She realised that the young man was pressing closer to her, his hand digging into her bare arm, making her groan with painful pleasure, and now, as her eyes plunged deep into his, she did think she knew him. She thought he was an actor whom she had adored from afar when she was a little girl. Delighted, she was just about to speak his name, but he silenced her soft cry with an ardent kiss. And so, their lips merged together, the two of them burning like a single body in each other’s embrace, they flew through the halls as if borne up on a blissful wind. The walls streamed past, she was no longer conscious of the hovering vault of the ceiling or of the hour, she felt amazingly weightless, all her limbs relaxed. And then, suddenly, someone touched her on the shoulder. She stopped, and the music stopped at the same time, the lights went out, the dark walls moved in on her, and her dancing partner had disappeared. “Give him back, you thief!” shouted that terrible woman, for it was she, making the walls ring with the sound, and she closed ice-cold fingers around Irene’s wrist. She resisted, hearing herself cry out with a mad shriek of horror, and the two of them wrestled, but the other woman was stronger. She tore off Irene’s pearl necklace, and half her dress with it, leaving her breasts bare and her arms exposed beneath the rags now hanging off her. All of a sudden there were other people around them again, streaming in from all the other halls on a rising tide of noise, staring with derision at her as she stood there half-naked, while the woman screeched: “She stole my beau, she did, that floozie, that adulteress!”

She didn’t know where to hide or which way to look, for the people were crowding in closer and closer, women looking at her with inquisitive eyes, hissing at her, grasping at her naked body, and now that her reeling gaze looked around for help she suddenly saw her husband standing motionless in the dark frame of the doorway, his right hand concealed behind his back. She screamed and ran away from him, ran through room after room, and the crowd, greedy for sensation, raced along after her. She felt more and more of her dress slip off, she could hardly clutch at it now. Then a door swung open ahead of her, eagerly she rushed down the stairs to save herself, but the terrible woman was waiting at the bottom of the staircase in her woollen skirt, with her claw-like hands outstretched. Irene swerved aside and ran out into the open air, but the other woman came after her, and so they both chased through the night down long, silent streets, and the street lights, grinning, bent down to greet them. She could hear the woman’s wooden clogs clattering along behind her, but whenever she reached a street corner the woman was there already, leaping out at her, and it was the same again at the next corner, she lay in wait beyond all the houses both to right and to left, always there, terrifyingly multiplied. There was no overtaking her, she always went on ahead and was there first, reaching out for Irene, who felt her knees begin to fail her. At last she saw the house where she lived and raced up to it, but as she wrenched the door open there stood her husband with a knife in his hand, his piercing gaze bent on her. “Where have you been?” he asked in sombre tones. “Nowhere,” she heard herself say, and already she heard the woman’s shrill laughter at her side. “I seen it! I seen it all!” screeched the grinning woman, who was suddenly there with her, laughing like a lunatic. And her husband raised the knife.

“Help!” she cried out. “Help!”

She was staring up, and her horrified eyes met her husband’s. What … what was all this? She was in her own room, and the ceiling lamp was on, casting a pale light. She was at home in her bed, she had only been dreaming. But why was her husband sitting on the edge of the bed, looking at her as if she were an invalid? Who had put the light on, why was he sitting there so rigid and motionless, staring at her so gravely? A shiver of horror ran through her once, and then again. Instinctively, she looked at his hand. No, there was no knife in it. Slowly, the drowsiness of sleep wore off, and so did the images it had brought like glaring flashes of lightning. She must have been dreaming, she must have called out in her dream and woken him. But why was he looking at her with such a serious, penetrating, implacably grave expression?

She tried to smile. “What … what is it? Why are you looking at me like that? I think I’ve been having a nightmare.”

“Yes, you called out in a loud voice. I could hear it in the other room.”

What did I call out, what did I give away, she thought, trembling, what does he know? She hardly dared to look up at him again. But he was gazing gravely down at her with a strange composure.

“What is it, Irene? There’s something the matter with you. You’ve been so different for the last few days, as if you had a fever, nervous, distracted, and now you cry out for help in your sleep.”

She tried to smile again. “No,” he persisted. “You mustn’t keep anything from me. Is there something on your mind, is anything troubling you? The whole household has noticed how you’ve changed. You ought to trust me, Irene.”

He moved a little closer to her, and she felt his fingers on her bare arm, caressing it. There was a strange light in his eyes. She was overcome by a longing to cast herself on his firm body, cling to him, confess everything and never let him go until he had forgiven her now, this very moment, now that he had seen her suffering.

But the pale light was shining down from the ceiling, illuminating her face, and she was ashamed. She felt afraid to say anything.

“Don’t worry, Fritz.” She tried to smile again, although she was still shivering all the way down to her bare toes. “I’m only feeling a little nervous strain. It will pass off.”

The hand holding hers was quickly withdrawn. She felt afraid, now that she looked at him, pale in the glassy light, his forehead clouded by the shadow of dark thoughts. Slowly, he stood up.

“I don’t know why, but these last few days I’ve felt as if you had something to tell me. Something that concerns only you and me. We are alone now, Irene.”

She lay there motionless, as if hypnotised by that grave, veiled glance. How good, she felt, everything could be now, she had only to say two words, two little words—forgive me. And he wouldn’t ask what for. But why was the light on, that forthright, bold, light listening to them? She felt she could have said it in the dark, but in the light her strength failed her.

“So there’s nothing, really nothing that you want to tell me?”

It was a terrible temptation! How soft his voice was! She had never heard him speak like that before. But the light hanging from the ceiling, that yellow, avid light!

She shook herself. “What can you be thinking of?” she laughed, and was seized by alarm again at hearing her own shrill tone of voice. “If I’m not sleeping well, does that mean I’m keeping secrets from you? Maybe even having some kind of adventure?”

Once more she shivered. How false, how insincere those words sounded. She was horrified by herself, right to the marrow of her bones, and instinctively she looked away from him.

“Well—good night, then.” He spoke curtly now, in an entirely different, sharp voice. It sounded like a threat, or black and dangerous mockery.

Then he put out the light. She saw his pale shape disappear through the doorway, soundless, wan, a nocturnal ghost, and when the door closed she felt as if the lid of a coffin were coming down. The whole world, she felt, was dead and hollow except for her own heart, beating loud and frantically against her breast in her rigid body, bringing her pain and more pain every time it beat.

Next day, when they were sitting at lunch together—the children had just been quarrelling, and it was quite difficult to make them calm down—the maid brought in a letter. For Madam, she said, and the messenger was waiting for an answer. Surprised, she saw unfamiliar handwriting on the envelope, and quickly opened it, only to suddenly turn pale when she read the first words. All at once she jumped up from the table. She was even more alarmed when she saw, from the evident surprise of the rest of the family, how thoughtlessly revealing her impetuous movement had been.

The letter was short. Just three brief lines: ‘Kindly give the bearer of this letter a hundred crowns at once.’ No signature, no date in the obviously disguised handwriting, only that cruelly urgent command! Irene hurried to her room to get the money, but she had mislaid the key to her money box. Frantically, she flung open all her drawers, rattling the contents about until at last she found it. She put the banknotes into an envelope with trembling fingers, and herself gave them to the messenger waiting at the door. She did it all mindlessly, as if under hypnosis, without even considering the possibility of hesitating. And then—hardly two minutes after leaving the dining room—she was back with her family again.

There was silence. She sat down with a shrinking sense of uneasiness, and was just trying to think of some excuse in a hurry when—and her hand shook so much that although she had picked up her glass she had to put it down again in haste—she realised, to her horror, that she had left the letter lying open beside her plate. Just one small movement, and her husband could have picked it up. Maybe a glance would have been enough to read the large, unformed characters in which those few lines were written. Words failed her. Surreptitiously, she crumpled up the note, but now, as she put it in her pocket and looked up, she met her husband’s eyes bent severely on her. It was a penetrating, stern and painful glance. She had never known him to look like that before. Only now, during these last few days, had he suddenly made her feel distrustful with such an expression on his face. It shook her to the core, and she was unable to parry it. A glance like that had paralysed her in the middle of dancing, and he had watched over her sleep last night with the same look, his eyes gleaming like the blade of a knife.

Did he know something, or did he want to know it, was that what sharpened his glance, made it so bright, so steely, so painful? And as she was still searching for something to say, a long-forgotten memory came back to her. Her husband had once told her how, as a lawyer, he had faced an investigating judge whose trick it was to look through his files during the examination as if short-sighted, but when the really important question came he would suddenly raise his eyes and turn their piercing gaze, like a dagger, on the suddenly alarmed defendant, who would then be discomposed by this bright lightning flash of concentrated attention, and the lie he had been carefully trying to maintain would lose its force. Could her husband be employing dangerous methods of that kind himself, and was she the victim? She shuddered, particularly because she knew what a great intellectual passion he felt for his chosen profession, far beyond that necessary for a legal career. He could track down the reasons for a crime, its development, the moment it turned to extortion, as intently as others might devote themselves to eroticism or gambling, and on a day when he was engaged in this psychological hunt he seemed to be inwardly radiant. The keen nervous energy that often made him recollect forgotten verdicts in the middle of the night expressed itself outwardly then in a steely inscrutability; he ate and drank little, but smoked the whole time, and he seemed to be saving his words for the coming hour in court. She had once gone to hear him make a plea, and never went again, she was so shaken by the dark passion and almost malevolent fire of his delivery and the sombre, austere expression on his face. Now she suddenly thought she detected the same look again in his fixed gaze under those menacingly frowning brows.

All these lost memories came crowding in on her in that single second, and kept her lips from uttering the words that they were trying to form. She said nothing, and became increasingly confused the more she realised how dangerous her silence was—she was losing her last plausible chance of explaining herself. She dared not raise her eyes, yet now, looking down, she was even more alarmed to see his hands, usually so still and steady, moving up and down on the table like little wild animals. Luckily lunch was soon over, and the children jumped up and ran into the next room, chattering in their clear, cheerful voices, while the governess tried in vain to moderate their high spirits. Her husband also got to his feet, went out of the dining room, treading heavily, and did not look back.

As soon as she was alone she took out the fateful letter again. She read the lines once more: ‘Kindly give the bearer of this letter a hundred crowns at once.’ Then she tore it into small pieces in her rage, and was crumpling them up into a ball to throw them in the waste-paper basket when she thought better of it, stopped, leant over the stove on the hearth and threw the paper into the hissing fire. The white flame that sprang up, greedily devouring the threat, soothed her.

At that moment she heard her husband’s returning footsteps. He was already at the door. She quickly straightened up, her face flushed from the warmth of the fire and from knowing that she was caught in the act. The door of the stove was still open, giving her away, and she awkwardly tried to hide it by standing in front of the fireplace. He went up to the table, struck a match to light his cigar, and as the flame came close to his face she thought she saw the quivering of his nostrils that always showed he was angry. But he looked at her quite calmly. “I would just like to point out that you are not obliged to show me your correspondence. If you want to keep secrets from me, you are entirely at liberty to do so.” She did not reply, she dared not look at him. He waited for a moment, then breathed out the smoke of his cigar as if it came from deep inside him and left the room, again with that heavy tread.

She didn’t want to think of anything, she wished only to live in a numb state, filling her heart with empty, pointless occupation. She could not bear to be in the apartment any more, she felt that if she was not to go mad with horror she had to be out in the street among other people. Those hundred crowns had at least, she hoped, bought her a brief respite, a few days of freedom from the blackmailer, and she decided that she would venture to go for a walk. There were several items that she needed to buy, but above all, if she went out walking  that would cover up for the noticeable change in her habits in staying at home so much. She had developed a certain way of making her escape. On reaching the front door she rushed out into the busy life of the street with her eyes closed, as if jumping off a springboard. Once she felt the hard paving stones under her feet and knew that the warm torrent of humanity was around her, she went on in nervous haste, or as much haste as a lady could show without attracting attention, walking straight ahead with her eyes fixed on the ground, in the very natural fear of meeting that dangerous gaze again. If the woman was lying in wait, then at least she didn’t want to know it. And yet she realised that she was thinking of nothing else, and she jumped in alarm when someone touched her by chance in brushing past. Her nerves reacted painfully to every sound, every footstep behind her, every moving shadow. Only in a vehicle or in a building that she did not know could she breathe freely again.

A gentleman said good afternoon to her. Looking up, she recognised a family friend from the days of her youth, a friendly, talkative man with a grey beard. She usually tried to avoid him because of his way of talking for hours on end about his ailments, which were very likely imaginary. Today, however, she was sorry that she had merely returned his greeting instead of seeking his company. Walking with an acquaintance would have been good protection against another unexpected attack from her blackmailer. She hesitated, and was considering turning back, when she felt as if someone were coming up fast behind her, and instinctively, without stopping to think, she hurried on again. But still, with a sense of foreboding cruelly enhanced by fear, she felt that someone was rapidly approaching behind her back, and she herself walked faster and faster, although she knew that she could not escape pursuit in the end. Her shoulders were beginning to shrink in anticipation of the hand that now—for the steps were coming closer and closer—she felt sure would touch her next moment, and the more she tried to quicken her pace the heavier her knees felt. She sensed that the pursuer was very close.

“Irene!” called a voice behind her urgently, yet speaking in a soft tone, and coming to her senses, she realised that it was not, after all, the voice she feared, the terrible messenger of doom. Breathing a sigh of relief, she turned. It was her lover, and when she stopped so suddenly he almost collided with her. His face was pale, bearing all the signs of agitation, and now, under her uncomprehending gaze, he also looked ashamed. Uncertainly, he raised his hand in greeting and let it sink again when she did not offer him hers. The sight of him was so unexpected that she just stared at him for one or two seconds. In these days of fear, she had forgotten all about him. But now that she saw his pale, inquiring face at close quarters, with that expression of vacant perplexity, a hot wave of rage suddenly surged up in her. Her lips trembled, attempting to form words, and the distress in her face showed so clearly that he could only stammer her name in alarm. “Irene, what’s the matter?” And when he saw her impatient gesture, he added meekly, “What harm have I done you?”

She stared at him with barely repressed anger. “What harm have you done me?” she said, with a laugh of derision. “Oh, none! None at all! You’ve done only good! Only what’s right and proper.”

His expression was baffled, and his mouth dropped half-open, increasing the ridiculously simple-minded effect of his appearance. “But Irene … Irene!”

“Please don’t attract attention here!” she snapped at him brusquely. “And don’t trouble to put on an act for me! Your delightful lady friend is sure to be lurking somewhere near, ready to attack me again!”

“Who … who do you mean?”

She could have slapped his foolishly baffled, distorted face. She already felt her hand clutching her umbrella. She had never despised and hated anyone so much.

“But Irene … Irene,” he kept stammering in confusion. “What on earth have I done? All of a sudden you stay away … I’ve been waiting for you day and night. I’ve been standing outside your apartment block today, waiting for a chance to speak to you for a minute.”

“Waiting for … oh, I see! You too.” She felt that her anger was driving her mad. It would feel so good to strike him! However, she controlled herself, cast him one more glance of burning revulsion, as if considering whether to spit all her accumulated rage out into his face in a torrent of abuse, and then, instead, she suddenly turned and made her way into the busy crowd without looking back. He stood there with his pleading hand still outstretched, bewildered and shaken, until the movement of the crowd in the street took hold of him and swept him away with it like a leaf sinking in the current, rocking and circling, and finally carried away by no will of its own.

The idea that such a man had ever been her lover suddenly struck her as absolutely unreal and senseless. She could remember nothing about him, not the colour of his eyes or the shape of his face. She had no physical memory of his caresses, and none of his words echoed in her mind apart from that pitiful, childish, dog-like “But, Irene!” stammered out in desperation. Although he was the cause of all misfortune, she had not once thought of him in all these days, even in her dreams. He meant nothing in her life, he was no temptation now, hardly even a memory. She didn’t understand how her lips could ever have touched his, and she felt strong enough to have sworn that she had never really listened to him. What had driven her into his arms, what terrible madness had led her to embark on an adventure that her own heart no longer understood, and hardly even her mind? She knew nothing more about it, everything in what had passed was strange to her, she was a stranger to herself.

But then again, hadn’t everything else changed in these few days, this single week of horror? Corrosive fear had eaten into her life like nitric acid, separating its elements. The weight of everything was suddenly different, all values were reversed, all relationships confused. She felt as if until this moment she had merely been groping her way vaguely through life with her eyes half closed, and now everything was illuminated with terrible clarity. Before her, as close as her own breath, were considerations that she had never touched but which, she suddenly realised, made up her real life, and others again that had once seemed important to her had dispersed like smoke. Up to this point she had mingled with lively society in the noisy, loquacious company of people who moved in well-to-do circles, and in essence she had lived only for herself, but now, after a week immured in her own household, she felt she did not miss that society. Instead, she was repelled by the pointless hurry and bustle of those who had nothing to do, and instinctively she judged the shallowness of her old inclinations, her constant neglect of love in action, in the light of this first truly strong feeling to come to her. She looked at her past as if looking into an abyss. Married for eight years, and deluding herself that she enjoyed too modest a happiness, she had never tried to come closer to her husband, she had remained a stranger to his real nature and no less to her own children. Paid domestic staff stood between them and her, governesses and servants who relieved her of all those little anxieties which, she only now began to sense—now that she had looked more closely at her children’s lives—were more alluring than the ardent glances of men, more delightful than a lover’s embrace. Slowly, her life was acquiring new meaning. Everything had affinities, all at once turning a gravely significant face to her. Now that she had known danger, and with that danger a genuine emotion, everything, however strange, suddenly began to have something in common with her. She felt herself in everything, and the world, once as transparent to her as glass, had come to mirror the dark shape of her own shadow. Wherever she looked, whatever she heard, was suddenly real.

She went to sit with the children. Their governess was reading aloud to them, a fairy tale about a princess who was allowed into all the rooms in her palace except the one with a door that was locked with a silver key. She opened the door all the same, and unlocking it sealed her fate. Wasn’t that her own story? She too had been intrigued by forbidden fruit, simply because it was forbidden, and it had brought her misfortune. Only a week ago, the simplicity of the little story would have made her smile, but now she felt that there was deep wisdom in it. There was a story in the newspaper about an army officer who had been blackmailed into turning traitor. She shuddered, and understood him. Wouldn’t she herself make impossible efforts to get money in order to buy a few days of peace, a semblance of happiness? Every line she read about suicide, every reported crime, every act of desperation suddenly became very real to her. She could identify with all of them—the man tired of life, the desperate man, the seduced maidservant, the abandoned child. Her own story had the ring of theirs. All at once she understood the full richness of life, and knew that no hour of her own existence could seem poor to her any more. Now that it was all coming to an end, she felt for the first time that life was just beginning. And was a vicious female to have the power to take this wonderful sense of being attuned to the whole world, and tear it apart with her coarse hands? Was Irene’s one guilty act to bring everything great and fine of which, for the first time, she felt capable, down into ruin?

And why, she thought, blindly resisting a disaster that she unconsciously knew made sense, why such a terrible punishment for a small peccadillo? She knew so many women, vain, bold, sensual, who kept lovers, spending money on them and mocking their husbands in those other men’s arms, women who lived a lie and were very much at home there, who became more beautiful in dissembling, stronger as the chase went on, cleverer in danger, while she herself collapsed, powerless, at the first touch of fear, at her first real transgression.

But was she really guilty at all? She felt in her heart that the man who had been her lover was a stranger to her, that she had never given him any part of her real life. She had received nothing from him, he had given her nothing. All of that, now past and forgotten, was not really her offence, it was the misdemeanour of another woman whom she herself did not understand, whom she did not even like to remember. Could you be punished for an offence when time had atoned for it?

Suddenly she felt alarm. She had an idea that she had not thought that herself. Who had said it? Someone close to her, only recently, only a few days ago. She thought about it, and her alarm was no less when she realised that it was her own husband who had put the idea into her mind. He had come home from a trial looking pale and upset, and suddenly, taciturn as he usually was, he had told her and some friends who happened to be present: “Sentence was passed on an innocent man today.” Asked what he meant, he told them, still much distressed by the incident, that a thief had been condemned for a crime committed three years before. He himself felt that the offender was innocent, because three years after the crime he was no longer the same man. So another man was being punished, even punished twice over, for he had spent those three years imprisoned in his own fear and the constant anxiety of being found out and convicted.

And she remembered, with horror, how she had contradicted him at the time. Remote from real life as her feelings were, she had see the criminal only as a pest, a parasite on comfortable bourgeois society, a man who must at all costs be removed from circulation. Only now did she feel how pitiful her arguments had been, how just and kindly his. But would he be able to understand that it was not really another man she had loved, only the idea of adventure? That he himself was also guilty of showing her too much kindness, making her life so enervatingly comfortable? Would he be able to show justice in judging his own case?

But she was not to be allowed to indulge in hope. Another note arrived the very next day, another whiplash reviving her exhausted fear. This time the blackmailer was demanding two hundred crowns, and she handed them over meekly. The sudden steep rise in the sum of blackmail extorted was terrible. Nor did she now feel financially capable of satisfying it, for although her own family was prosperous she was not in any situation to get her hands on large sums without attracting attention. And then, what use would it be? She knew that tomorrow the demand would be for four hundred crowns, soon it would be a thousand, the more she gave the more would be asked, and finally, as soon as her money ran out, the anonymous letter would arrive and it would all be over. What she was buying was only time, a breathing space, two days of rest, or three, maybe a week, but time that was worthless in itself, full of torment and suspense. She had been sleeping poorly for weeks now, and her dreams were worse than waking; she felt the lack of fresh air, exercise, rest, occupation. She could not read any more, could not do anything, hunted as she was by the demons of her own fear. She did not feel well. Sometimes she had to sit down suddenly when her heart palpitated too vigorously, and a restless heaviness filled her limbs with almost painful weariness, like some viscous liquid, but that weariness still fought against sleep. Her whole life was undermined by her devouring fear, her body was poisoned, and in her heart she really longed for her sickness to break out in visible pain, some kind of obvious, perceptible clinical condition, something that those around her would understand and pity. In these hours of secret torment, she envied the sick. How good it must be to lie in a sanatorium, in a white bed between white walls, surrounded by sympathy and flowers. Visitors would come, everyone would be kind to her, and behind the clouds of suffering the great, kindly sun of restoration to health would already be dawning in the distance. If you were in physical pain at least you could groan out loud, but she had to keep acting the tragi-comic part of a woman in good health and good spirits. Every day, almost every hour, faced her with new and terrible situations. She had to smile and look happy while all her nerves were on edge, and no one could even guess at the constant strain of this assumed cheerfulness, the heroic strength that she exerted in the daily yet useless violence she did herself.

Only one of all the people around her seemed, she vaguely felt, to guess something of the terrors she was suffering, and he did so only because he was watching her. She felt sure, and that certainty forced her to be doubly careful, that her husband was thinking about her all the time, just as she was thinking about him. They manoeuvred day and night as if circling around one another, each trying to guess the other’s secret while keeping their own safe. He too had changed recently. His menacing severity in those first few days of inquisition had given way to his own manner of showing kindness and concern, and she was instinctively reminded of the days when they had first been engaged. He was treating her like an invalid, with a care and anxiety on her behalf that bewildered her, because such undeserved love made her feel ashamed. On the other hand she also feared it, because it could be just a trick to get her secret out of her at some sudden, unexpected moment. Since the night when he had heard her call out in her sleep, and the day when he had seen the letter in her hands, his distrust had seemed to turn to sympathy. He was trying to win her confidence with a tenderness that sometimes reassured her and made her feel like yielding to him, only to return to her suspicions of him the next moment. Was it just a trick, the tempting trap set by an investigating judge for the defendant, a snare to catch her confidence? If she confessed, would it be like setting out along a drawbridge which was then suddenly raised, leaving her defenceless in his power. Or did he too feel that this state of heightened watchfulness, waiting and listening, was unendurable, was his sympathy strong enough for him to suffer secretly because of her own suffering, which must be getting more visible daily? She felt, with a strange tremor, that at times he was almost offering her the words that would bring release, making it enticingly easy for her to confess. She understand his intentions, and was grateful for his kindness. But she also felt that with her stronger liking for him, her sense of shame was also growing, and it kept a sterner guard on her tongue than his distrust had done before.

Just once at this time he spoke to her very clearly, looking her in the eye. She had come home to hear loud voices as she entered the front hall—her husband’s, firm and energetic, and the scolding, loquacious voice of the governess, as well as tears and sobbing from the children. Her first feeling was one of alarm. She was always apprehensive when she heard voices raised, or there was some kind of domestic upset in the household. Fear was her reaction to everything out of the ordinary, and this time it was fear that the letter had already arrived and her secret was out. Whenever she opened the door and came in these days, she looked round at the faces she saw and wondered whether something had happened in her absence; had the catastrophe come down on her while she was out? This time, as she soon realised, much to her relief, it was only a quarrel between the children, and a small improvised trial was in progress. A few days ago an aunt had brought the boy a toy, a brightly painted little horse. His envious younger sister didn’t like her own present so much, and was incensed. She had tried in vain to stake a claim to the little horse, behaving so wilfully that the boy had said she wasn’t even to touch his toy. That had led first to loud protests from the child and then to a cowed, sullen, obstinate silence. Next morning, however, the little horse had disappeared without trace, and all the boy’s efforts to find it were in vain, until by chance the lost toy was finally discovered in pieces in the stove, its wooden parts broken, its skin ripped off and its stuffing removed. Suspicion naturally fell on the little girl—the boy had run to his father in tears to complain of his naughty sister, who couldn’t help trying to justify herself, and so the interrogation began.

Irene felt a pang of envy. Why did the children always take their troubles to her husband, never to her? They had always confided their quarrels and complaints to him, and until now she had been happy to be free of these petty squabbles, but suddenly she wanted to be told about them, because she sensed that there was love and trust in such confidences.

The little trial was soon over. The girl denied the charge at first, although with her eyes timidly lowered, and the way her shoulders were shaking gave her away. The governess gave evidence against her—she had heard the child threatening angrily to throw the horse out of the window, and it was useless for the girl to try denying it any further. There was a small outburst of tears and despair. Irene looked at her husband. It was as if he were sitting in judgement not on the child but on herself and her own fate. She might be facing him like that tomorrow, her own shoulders shaking with sobs, the same break in her voice. Her husband looked stern as long as the child stuck to her lie, and then broke her resistance down word by word, without ever letting one of her denials anger him. But once denial had given way to a fit of the sulks he spoke kindly to her, showing but at the same time to some extent excusing the inevitability of her actions, pointing out that she had done her shocking deed in her first, unreasoning anger, never stopping to think that it would really hurt her brother. Then he explained to the child, who was getting less and less sure of herself, that he could understand what she had done, but it was reprehensible all the same, and he spoke so warmly yet so forcefully that in the end she burst into tears and began crying frantically. And finally, through her torrent of tears, she stammered out her confession.

Irene hurried over to embrace the weeping child, but the little girl angrily pushed her away. Her husband, too, shook his head, a warning to her not to show pity too soon, for he did not want the offence to go unpunished, and the punishment he decreed, which was slight in itself but went to the child’s heart, was that she could not go to a children’s party next day, after she had been looking forward to it for weeks. The child was still in tears as she heard sentence passed, and her brother began crowing over her, but his premature show of malice instantly brought retribution down on his own head. The upshot was that he too was refused permission to go to the party because of the malice he had shown his sister. Sadly, comforted only by the fact that they were both being punished, the two of them finally went away, and Irene was left alone with her husband.

Here at last, she suddenly felt, was an opportunity for them to stop conversing through insinuations, a chance for her make her own confession under cover of a discussion of the little girl’s guilt and her admission of it. A sense of relief came over her at the idea of being able to confess and ask for compassion, at least in veiled form. If he looked kindly on her plea for the child, it would be like a sign and an omen, and she knew that then she might be able to summon up the courage to speak on her own behalf.

“Oh, Fritz,” she began, “Are you really going to stop the children going to their party tomorrow? They’ll be very unhappy, especially Helene. After all, what she did wasn’t so very bad. Why are you so hard on her? Don’t you feel sorry for the poor child?”

He looked at her. Then he sat down at his leisure. Yes, he obviously seemed willing to discuss the subject at greater length, and a foreboding, both pleasant and unnerving, made her suspect that he was prepared to argue it point-by-point with her. Everything in her was waiting for his long pause to end. But perhaps intentionally, perhaps because he was deep in thought, he let it go on for a long time before continuing.

“Don’t I feel sorry for her, you ask? Well, I won’t say any more about that today. She feels better now that she’s been punished, although her punishment seems bitter too. She was unhappy yesterday when she put the broken bits of the poor little horse in the stove. Everyone in the house was looking for it, and she was afraid all day that it was sure to be found. That fear was worse than the punishment, which after all is something definite, and whether it’s hard on her or not, it’s still better than the terrible uncertainty and cruel suspense she was feeling earlier. As soon as she knew her punishment she felt all right. Don’t let her tears lead you astray; yes, they came pouring out, but they’d been dammed up inside her before, and they hurt worse there than on the surface. If she weren’t a child, or if we could somehow see right into her mind, I think we’d discover that she is really glad to have been found out, in spite of her punishment and her tears. She’s certainly happier than she was yesterday, when she appeared not to have a care in the world, and no one suspected her.”

Irene looked up. She felt as if every word were directed at her. But he seemed to take no notice of her, perhaps misinterpreting her movement, and only went on in a firm voice:

“It really is so, you can believe me. I’ve seen this kind of thing in court and from legal investigations. Defendants in court suffer most from the secrecy, the threat of discovery, the cruel pressure on them to maintain a lie against thousands of little surreptitious attacks. It’s terrible to see a case where the judge already has everything in his hands—the defendant’s guilt, the proof of it, perhaps he even has his verdict ready, only there’s no confession yet, it’s still locked inside the defendant, and however he tries he can’t get it out. I hate to see a defendant writhing and squirming while his ‘Yes, I did it’ has to be torn out of his resisting flesh as if it were on a fish hook. Sometimes it gets stuck high in his throat, and still there’s an irresistible force inside him trying to bring it to the light of day. Defendants retch on it, the words are almost spoken, and then the evil power comes over them, that extraordinary sense of mingled defiance and fear, and they swallow it down again. And the struggle begins all over again. Sometimes the judges are suffering more than the prisoner in the dock. The criminal always sees the judge as his enemy, whereas in fact he is trying to help. As a defending lawyer I’m really supposed to warn my clients against confessing, I’m expected to shore up their lies, consolidate them, but in my heart I often can’t bring myself to do it, because not confessing makes them suffer worse than confessing to their crime and paying the penalty. I still don’t really understand how someone can commit a crime, in full knowledge of the danger, and then not find the courage to confess. It seems to me that their petty fear of a few little words is more pitiful than any crime.”

“Do you think it’s … it’s always just fear that … that keeps people from speaking out? Couldn’t it be … well, couldn’t it be shame? Suppose they’re ashamed to talk about it and expose themselves in front of so many people?”

He looked up in surprise. He was not used to getting answers from her. But the word she had used evidently fascinated him.

“Shame, you say … well, shame is only a kind of fear, but a better one, a fear not of the punishment but … yes. Yes, I see what you mean.”

He had risen to his feet, strangely agitated, and was walking up and down. The idea seemed to have struck a chord, bringing something in him to vigorous life. He suddenly stopped.

“I’ll admit, yes, shame in front of other people, strangers … the hoi polloi who devour other people’s troubles in newspaper stories like a sandwich … but for that very reason they could at least tell those who are close to them. Do you remember that arsonist, the one I was defending last year? The one who took such a curious liking to me? He told me everything, little stories about his childhood, incidents even more intimate than that. You see, he had certainly committed the crime, and he was found guilty, but he wouldn’t confess it even to me. That was because he was afraid I might give him away. It wasn’t shame, because he trusted me … I think I was the only person for whom he’d ever felt anything like friendship in his life. So it wasn’t a sense of shame in front of strangers … what would that mean when he knew he could trust me?”

“Perhaps—” She had to turn away because he was looking at her so intently, and she heard a tremor in his voice. “Perhaps you’d feel most ashamed with … with those you’re closest to.”

He stopped suddenly, as if a powerful idea had seized on him.

“Then you think … you think …” And suddenly his voice changed, became soft and low. “You think little Helene might have confessed more easily to someone else? The governess, perhaps. You think she …”

“I’m sure of it. She put up such resistance to you only because … well, what you think matters more than anything to her. Because … because she loves you best.”

He stopped again.

“You … you may be right. Yes, I’m sure you are. How strange that I never thought of that before … yet it’s so simple. Yes, I may have been too hard on her. You know me—I don’t mean it like that. But I’ll go in and see her now … and of course she can go to the party, I only wanted to punish her for her defiance, her resistance and … well, I suppose for not trusting me. But you’re quite right, I don’t want you to think I can’t forgive … Irene, I wouldn’t like you, of all people, to think such a thing.”

He was looking at her, and she felt herself blushing under his gaze. Was he saying these things on purpose, or was it coincidence, a dangerous, insidious coincidence? She still felt so dreadfully undecided.

“Well, the sentence is quashed.” A certain cheerfulness seemed to come back into his voice. “Helene is free to go to the party, and I’ll tell her so myself. Are you satisfied with me now? Or is there anything else you want? You … you see … you see I’m in a magnanimous mood today … maybe because I’m glad to have seen an injustice in time. That always brings relief, Irene, always …”

She thought she understood what the emphasis in his words meant. Instinctively she moved closer to him, she already felt the words rising in her, and he too stepped forwards as if he was in haste to take from her whatever so obviously troubled her. Then she met his eyes, and saw in them an eager desire for her confession, for some part of herself, a burning impatience, and all at once everything she had been feeling collapsed. Her hand fell wearily to her side, and she turned away. It was useless, she felt, she would never be able to say the one thing that would set her free, the one thing that was burning inside her and consuming her peace of mind. She sensed a warning in the air, like thunder coming closer, but she knew she could not escape. And in the secret depths of her heart she longed, now, for what she had feared so long, the lightning flash of discovery that would come as a release.

Her wish was to be granted sooner than she guessed. The struggle had been going on for fourteen days now, and Irene felt she had exhausted her strength. It was four days since she had heard from the woman, and fear had lodged so deep in her body, was so much at one with her blood, that she started up abruptly whenever the doorbell rang so that she would be in time to intercept the next blackmail letter herself. There was impatience, almost even longing in her avid expectation, for with every payment she bought an evening of peace, a few hours with the children, a walk. For an evening, for a day she could breathe easily, go out into the street, visit friends. Although to be sure sleep, in its wisdom, would not let such a poor sort of comfort blind her deceitfully to certain knowledge of the danger always close at hand. Her sleep brought dreams of fear to consume her by night.

Once again, she had run to answer the door when the bell rang, even though she realised that her restless desire to get there ahead of the servants was bound to be noticed, and could easily arouse hostile suspicions. But while sober circumspection might put up little acts of resistance, it weakened when, at the sound of the telephone ringing, a step in the street behind her, or the summons of the doorbell her whole body was on the alert, as if it had felt the lash of a whip. And now the sound of the bell had brought her out of her room and running to the door again. She opened it only to find herself looking in surprise, for a moment, at a strange lady. Then, retreating in alarm, she recognised the hated face of the blackmailer, who was wearing a new outfit and an elegant hat.

“Why, if it ain’t you in person, Frau Wagner. I’m ever so glad. I got something important to say to you.” And without waiting for any answer from the terrified Irene, who was supporting herself with one trembling hand on the door handle, she marched in, put down her sunshade—a sunshade of a glaring, bright-red hue, obviously bought with the fruits of her blackmailing raids. She was moving with great assurance, as if she were in her own home, looking around with pleasure, as if with a sense of reassurance, at the handsome furnishings. She walked on, uninvited, to the door of the drawing room, which was half-open. “This way, right?” she asked with some derision, and when the alarmed Irene, still incapable of saying anything, tried to deter her, she added reassuringly: “We can get this settled good and quick if you’d like to see me out of here.”

Irene followed her without protest. The mere idea that her blackmailer was here, in her own apartment, paralysed her. It was an audacity going beyond her worst expectations. She felt as if she must be dreaming the whole thing.

“Ooh, nice place you got here, very nice,” said the woman, admiring her surroundings with obvious satisfaction as she lowered herself into a chair. “Ever so cosy, this is. Look at all them pictures, too. Well, you can see what a poor way the likes of us live. Now you got a nice life here, Frau Wagner, a real nice life.”

And now at last, as she saw the criminal female so much at ease in her own drawing room, the tormented Irene’s fury burst out.

“What do you think you’re doing, you blackmailer? Following me into my own home! But I’m not letting you torture me to death. I’m going to …!”

“Now, now, I wouldn’t speak so loud, not if I was you,” the other woman answered, with insulting familiarity. “That door’s not closed, the servants can hear. Well, that’s no skin off of my nose. I’m not denying nothing, Lord save us, no, after all, I can’t be no worse off in jail than now, not with the sort of miserable life I lead. But you, Frau Wagner, you want to go a bit more careful-like. I’ll close that door right now if you really want to let off steam. Tell you what, though, might as well tell you straight out, shouting all them bad words won’t get you nowhere with me.”

Irene’s resolve, steeled for a moment by anger, collapsed helplessly again in the face of the woman’s implacability. Like a child waiting to hear what it must do, she stood there uneasily, almost humbly.

“Well then, Frau Wagner, I won’t beat about the bush. I’m in a bad way, like I told you before, you know that by now. So I need cash down. I been in debt a long time, and there’s other stuff as well. That’s why I come here to get you to help me out with—well, let’s say four hundred crowns.”

“But I can’t,” Irene stammered, horrified by the sum of money, which indeed she did not have in the apartment in ready cash. “I really don’t have that much any more. I’ve already given you three hundred crowns this month. Where do you think I’d get the money?”

“Oh, you’ll do it and no mistake, just you think how. A rich lady like you, why, you can get all the money you want. But you got to do it, see? So think it over, Frau Wagner, why don’t you? You’ll do it all right.”

“I really don’t have it. I’d be happy to give it to you, but I truly can’t get hold of such a large sum of money. I could give you something … maybe a hundred crowns …”

“Like I said, four hundred, that’s what I need.” She spoke brusquely, as if insulted by the suggestion.

“But I just don’t have it!” cried the desperate Irene. Suppose her husband were to come in now, she thought fleetingly, he could come home at any moment. “I swear I don’t have it.”

“Then you better make sure you do.”

“I can’t.”

The woman looked her up and down as if assessing her value.

“Well, let’s see … f ’rinstance, that ring there. Suppose you was to pawn that, it’d fetch a tidy sum. Not that I know that much about joolery, never had none meself … but I reckon you’d get four hundred crowns for it.”

“My ring!” cried Irene. It was her engagement ring, the only one that she never took off, a setting of a beautiful precious stone that made it very valuable.

“Go on, why not? I’ll send you the pawnshop ticket, you can get it back any time you like. I’m not planning to redeem it and keep it, not me. What’d a poor girl like me do with a posh ring like that?”

“Why are you persecuting me? Why do you torment me? I can’t … I can’t. Surely you must understand that. I’ve done all I could, you can see I have. Oh, surely you must understand! Take pity on me!”

“Nobody never took no pity on me. I could’ve starved to death for all anyone cared. Why’d I have pity on a rich lady like you?”

Irene was about to return a forceful answer, but then—and her blood ran cold—she heard the latch of the front door fall into place. It must be her husband coming home from his chambers. Without stopping to think, she snatched the ring from her finger and handed it to the woman waiting there, who swiftly pocketed it.

“Don’t you worry, I’ll be off now,” nodded the woman, perceiving the unspeakable fear in her face and the close attention she was paying to the front hall, where a man’s footsteps were clearly audible. She opened the drawing-room door, and in passing wished good day to Irene’s husband as he came in. He glanced at her for a moment, but did not seem to pay her much attention as she left.

“A lady coming to ask about something,” explained Irene, with the last of her strength, as soon as the door had closed behind the woman. The worst moment was over. Her husband did not reply, but calmly went into the dining room, where the table was already laid for lunch.

Irene could almost feel the air burning the place on her finger that was usually enclosed by the cool circle of her ring. It was as if the bare skin were the mark of a brand that would inevitably attract all eyes. She hid her hand again and again during the meal, and as she did so she was plagued by a curious feeling, the result of nervous strain, that her husband’s glance kept going to that hand, following it in all its wanderings. With all her might, she tried to distract his attention and keep a conversation going by asking constant questions. She talked and talked, to him, to the children, to the governess, again and again she rekindled the conversation with the little flames of her inquiries, but her breath kept running out, it was stifled, it failed her. She did her best to seem in high spirits and persuade the others to be cheerful, she teased the children, egging them on to argue with each other, but they neither argued nor laughed. Even she felt that her cheerfulness must be striking a false note, and it subconsciously alienated them. The harder she tried, the less successful her efforts were. Finally she fell silent, exhausted.

The others were silent too. All she heard was the faint clatter of plates, and inside her the rising voices of her fear. Then, all of a sudden, her husband said: “Where’s your ring today, Irene?”

She started nervously. Deep inside her something said a single phrase. All over! But still she instinctively put up a defence. Summon up all your strength, she told herself. Just for one more sentence, one more word. Find one more lie, a final lie.

“I … I took it to be cleaned.”

And as if the lie itself had strengthened her, she added firmly: “I’m getting it back the day after tomorrow.” The day after tomorrow. Now she was bound to her word. The lie would surely collapse, and she with it, if she did not succeed in redeeming the ring. She had set the time limit herself, and all of a sudden a new feeling was added to her confused fears, a kind of happiness to know that the moment of decision was so close. The day after tomorrow. Now she knew how much time she had left, and she felt a curious calm born of that certainty mingling with her fear. Something rose in her, a new strength. The power to live and the power to die.

The knowledge that, at last, her decision was certainly so close began to bring unexpected clarity to her mind. As if miraculously, her nervous stress gave way to logical thought, her fear to a crystal-clear calm suddenly enabling her to see everything in her life as if it were transparent, and to value it at its true worth. She weighed up her life as a whole and felt that it was still a heavy weight, but that if she could only hold on to it in the new, intensified, more elevated frame of mind that these days of fear had shown her, if she could begin it again from the beginning, pure and sure and straightforward, she was ready to do so. But to live the life of a divorced woman, an adulteress, stained by scandal—no, she was too tired for that, and too tired to continue the dangerous game of buying respite for a limited period. Resistance, she felt, was unthinkable now. The end was near; she might be given away by her husband, her children, by everything around her, and indeed by herself. Flight from an apparently omnipresent adversary was impossible. And confession, the one thing that could surely help her, was out of the question; she knew that by now. There was only one path still open to her, but it was a path from which there was no return.

Life was still alluring. Today was one of those typical spring days that sometimes break vigorously out of the bonds of winter, a day with a blue sky so high and wide that it made you feel you were breathing easily again after many dismal, wintry hours.

The children came running in, wearing clothes in pale colours for the first time this year, and she had to force herself not to shed tears in response to their happy jubilation. As soon as the sound of their laughter and its painful echo in her mind had died away, she set about carrying out her own decisions with determination. First she was going to try to recover the ring, for whatever happened to her now, she did not want any suspicion to fall on her memory. No one must have visible evidence of her guilt. No one, least of all her children, was ever to guess at the terrible secret that had torn her away from them. It must appear to be pure chance, and no one’s responsibility.

First she went to a pawnbroker’s to pledge an inherited piece of jewellery that she almost never wore, thus providing herself with enough money, if need be, to buy back the ring that could betray her from the woman who had taken it. Then, as soon as she had the cash in her bag, she went walking at random, earnestly hoping for what, until yesterday, she had most feared—to meet the blackmailer. The air was mild, the sun shone above the rooftops. Something in the wild wind chasing white clouds swiftly over the sky seemed to have infected the people walking in the street, all of them at a lighter, livelier pace than in the bleak days of winter gloom. And she herself thought she felt something of it. The idea of dying, the idea she had caught in flight yesterday and clasped firmly in her trembling hand, became a monstrosity, eluded her senses. Was it possible that a word from some dreadful woman could destroy all this, the buildings with their bright façades, the surging of her own blood? Could a word extinguish the never-ending flame with which the whole world blazed in her fast-breathing heart?

She walked and walked, but her head was not bowed now. Her eyes searched almost eagerly for the woman she expected to see. Now the prey was in search of the hunter, and just as a weakened, hunted animal, feeling that escape is no longer possible, will turn suddenly with the defiance of despair to face its pursuer, ready to fight back, she too wanted to see her tormentor face to face and fight back with the very last of the strength that the will to live gives desperate creatures. She stayed close to her home on purpose, because it was the neighbourhood where the blackmailer had usually lain in wait for her, and once she even hurried across the road when the clothes worn by another woman reminded her of the person she was after. The ring itself was not her chief anxiety—recovering it would mean only postponement, not release—but she did long for the meeting as a kind of sign from fate, sealing a life and death decision that had been made by some higher power but depended on her own determination. However, she could not see the woman anywhere. She had disappeared into the endless hurry and bustle of the great city like a rat going down its hole. Disappointed, but not yet hopeless, she went home in the middle of the day and continued her vain search immediately after lunch. She patrolled the streets again, and when she could not find the woman anywhere she felt a revival of the horror that she had almost managed to stifle. It was not the woman herself who troubled her now, nor the ring, but the mysterious aspect of all those meetings. Her reasoning mind could no longer entirely comprehend it. The woman had discovered her name and address as if by magic, she knew all about the hours she kept, she knew about her domestic life, she had always turned up at the worst, most dangerous moments, and now all of a sudden she had disappeared just when she was actually wanted. She must be somewhere in the hurry and bustle of the city, close when she wanted to be close, yet out of reach as soon as Irene wanted to find her. And the amorphous nature of the threat, the elusive proximity of the blackmailer, close to her own life and yet beyond contact, left the already exhausted Irene a helpless prey to her ever more mystifying fears. Nervously now, with a feverish step, she kept walking up and down the same streets. Walking the streets like a prostitute, she thought. But the woman was nowhere to be seen. Now darkness came down like a menace, the early spring evening cast shadows over the clear colour of the sky, and night was falling fast. Lights came on along the streets, the stream of humanity was making its way home at a faster pace, all life seemed to be swallowed up in its dark current. She went up and down a few more times, scrutinising the street once more with all that remained of her hope, and then she turned home. She was freezing cold.

Wearily, she went up to the apartment. She heard the children being put to bed, but she avoided going in to say goodnight to them, wishing them well for that one night while she herself thought of the eternal night ahead of her. Why go in to them now? To sense the unclouded happiness of their exuberant kisses, see the love in their bright faces? Why torment herself still further with a joy that was already lost? She gritted her teeth—no, she didn’t want the sensations of life any more, the kindness and laughter that linked her to so many memories, when all those links must be violently broken tomorrow. She would think only of unpleasant things, ugly and vile, her own undoing, the blackmailer, the scandal, everything that was driving her to the edge of the abyss.

Her husband’s return interrupted her dismal, lonely reflections. He was in a good mood and struck up a lively conversation, trying to come close to her, at least in words, and asking a great many questions. She thought she detected a certain nervousness in the sudden concern he showed for her, but remembering yesterday’s conversation she was not going to involve herself in another like it. Her fears kept her from letting love bind her or affection hold her back. He seemed to feel her reluctance, and be rather troubled by it. For her part, she was afraid that his concern would lead to another approach to her, and she said goodnight early. “I’ll see you tomorrow, then,” he replied. Then she left him.

Tomorrow—how close that was, and how endlessly far away! She passed a sleepless night, monstrously long and dark. Gradually the noises of the street died away, and from the reflections falling into her room she saw that the lights there were going out. Sometimes she thought she could sense the breathing of her family in the other rooms of the apartment, the lives of her children, of her husband, of the whole world, so close and yet so far away, almost lost to her now. But at the same time she was aware of an indescribable silence that seemed to proceed not from anything natural, anything around her, but from within, from some mysteriously rushing source. She felt coffined in endless silence, and the darkness of the invisible sky weighed down on her breast. Now and then the hours chimed a number in the darkness, and then the night was black and lifeless, but for the first time she thought she could understand the meaning of that endless, empty darkness. She was not thinking about farewells or her death any longer, only of how she could go to meet it, while sparing her children and herself, as far as possible, the shame of creating any sensation. She thought of all the ways she knew that led to death, all the possible methods of doing away with herself, until with a kind of happy surprise she suddenly remembered that the doctor had prescribed morphine for her when she was suffering from insomnia during a painful illness. She had taken the bitter-sweet poison in small drops out of a little bottle, and had been told at the time that its contents were enough to induce a gentle slumber. Oh, not to be hunted any more, to be able to rest, rest for ever, not to feel the hammer blows of fear on her heart any longer! The thought of that gentle slumber seemed immensely desirable to the sleepless Irene. She already thought she could taste the bitter flavour on her lips while her senses softly faded away. Quickly, she pulled herself together and put on the light. She soon found the little bottle, still half-full, but she was afraid that it might not be enough. Feverishly, she searched her chest of drawers until she finally found the prescription that would allow her to have a larger quantity made up for her. She folded the prescription, smiling, as if it were a banknote of a high denomination. Now she held death in her hands. Shivering slightly with cold, yet reassured, she was going back to bed when, as she passed the illuminated mirror, she suddenly saw herself approaching in the dark frame, ghostly, pale, hollow-eyed, and wrapped in her white nightdress as if in a shroud. Horror came over her. She put out the light, fled freezing to the bed she had left, and lay awake until day began to dawn.

In the morning she burnt her letters and put all kinds of small matters in order, but as far as she could she avoided seeing the children and everything else that was dear to her. She wanted to hold life at arm’s length now, not clutch it to her with desire and feel its enticements. It would make her decision harder to put into practice if she hesitated, and hesitation could only be in vain. Then she went out into the street once more to try her luck for the last time, hoping to see the blackmailer. Once again she walked restlessly up and down the streets, but no longer with that sense of heightened tension. Something in her was worn out, and she could not go on with the struggle. She walked and walked for two hours as if it were a duty. The woman was nowhere to be seen. That did not hurt her now. She almost stopped wishing for the encounter, she felt so powerless. She looked at the faces of people in the street, and they all seemed strange to her, all of them dead and gone. Everything was somehow far away, lost, and did not belong to her any more.

Only once did she start. She felt as if, looking around, she had suddenly met her husband’s eyes on the other side of the street, gazing at her with that strange, hard, piercing expression that she had only recently seen in them. Apprehensively, she looked again, but the figure had disappeared behind a passing vehicle, and she reassured herself by remembering that he was always in court at this time of day. Her agitation and her search were making her lose all sense of time, and she was late for lunch. But as usual he was not home yet himself, and did not arrive until a couple of minutes later. She thought that he seemed a little upset about something.

Now she was counting the hours until evening, and was alarmed to find how many there still were. How odd that was—you needed so little time to say goodbye, everything seemed worthless when you knew you couldn’t take it with you. A kind of drowsiness came over her. She mechanically went up and down the street again, at random now, without thinking or looking. The driver of a carriage pulled back his horses at a crossing; she had only just seen the pole of the carriage in front of her in time. The driver swore at her; she hardly turned. An accident would have meant safety, or postponement. Well, chance had spared her the decision. Wearily, she went on. It was good to think of nothing at all, just feel a confused, vague sense of the approaching end, a mist gently rising and enveloping everything.

When she happened to look up and saw the name of the street, she shuddered. In her confused wanderings, chance had brought her almost to the building where her former lover lived. Was that a sign? Perhaps he might yet be able to help her. He must know the woman’s address. She was trembling almost joyfully. Why hadn’t she thought of that before? It was the simplest solution! All at once her limbs felt stronger, hope gave new vigour to the sad, bewildered ideas in her head. He must go to that person with her and put an end to it once and for all. He must threaten the woman, force her to stop her blackmailing. Perhaps a good sum of money might even get her out of the city entirely. She suddenly felt sorry to have spoken as she did to the poor creature recently, but he would help her, she was sure of that. How strange that this hope of rescue came only now, at the last minute.

She hurried up the steps and rang the bell. No one came to the door. She listened; she felt as if she had heard cautious footsteps on the other side. She rang the bell once more. Silence again. And again a faint noise inside. Then her patience was exhausted—she rang and rang the bell without stopping. No less than her life was at stake.

At last there was movement behind the door, the lock clicked, and it was opened just a crack. “It’s me,” she quickly said.

Now he did open the door, looking as if her visit was a shock. “You … ah, so it’s you, dear lady,” he stammered, switching to a more formal tone and visibly embarrassed. “I was just … forgive me … I wasn’t expecting … wasn’t expecting to see you. Do please forgive my outfit.” He indicated his shirtsleeves. His shirt was open at the neck, and he wore no collar.

“I have to speak to you. It’s urgent. You must help me,” she said—uneasily, because he was keeping her standing in the hall like a beggar. “Won’t you let me come in and listen to me for a moment?” she added, her nerves on edge.

“Well,” he murmured awkwardly, with a surreptitious glance behind him, “it’s just that at this minute … I can’t really …”

“You must, must listen to me. It’s your fault, after all, it’s your duty to help me … you must get back the ring for me, you must! Or at least tell me her address. She’s been persecuting me, and now she’s disappeared … you must help me, listen, you must.”

He was staring at her. Only now did she realise that she was gasping out her words disjointedly.

“But of course, you don’t know … Well, she, I mean your mistress, the other one, the woman saw me leave you that last time, and since then she’s been pursuing me, blackmailing me … torturing me to death. Now she has my ring, and I must, I must get it back. I must have it by this evening, I said that today I’d … oh, will you help me?”

“But … but I …”

“Will you or won’t you?”

“But I don’t know any such person. I don’t know who you’re talking about. I’ve never had anything to do with any such woman.” He sounded almost angry.

“So … so you don’t know her? She just said so, she plucked it out of thin air? And she knows your name, too, and where I live. So perhaps it’s not true that she’s been blackmailing me? Perhaps I’ve simply been dreaming the whole thing?”

She burst into shrill laughter. He was clearly uncomfortable. For a moment it passed through his mind, as he saw her sparkling eyes, that she might be mad. Her behaviour was disturbed, her words made no sense. Anxiously, he looked around.

“Please calm down, dear lady … I assure you, there’s some mistake. It’s quite out of the question, it must … no, I can’t understand it myself. I don’t know any women like that. The couple of relationships I’ve had here since my … well, as you know, I haven’t been here long, and they weren’t that kind of … I don’t want to name names, but this is ridiculous. I assure you there must be some mistake.”

“So you won’t help me?”

“But of course … if I can.”

“Then … then come with me. We’ll visit her together.”

“Visit her? Who do you mean?” Again, as she seized his arm, he had a terrible feeling that she was deranged.

“Her … Will you come or not?”

“Of course, of course.” His suspicions were reinforced by the strength of her urgings. “Of course I will.”

“Then come along … this is life or death to me.”

He had to make a great effort to prevent himself from smiling. Then he suddenly became formal in his manner.

“Please forgive me, dear lady, but it’s out of the question at the moment. I’m giving a piano lesson … I can’t leave now …”

“I see … I see.” Her shrill laughter rang out in his face. “So this is how you give piano lessons, in your shirtsleeves … You liar!” And suddenly, as an idea came to her, she lunged forwards. He tried to hold her back. “So she’s here, that blackmailer, here with you, is she? Perhaps you’re both playing this game. Perhaps the two of you share everything you’ve extorted from me. But I’m going to get my hands on her. I’m not afraid of anything now.” She was shouting at the top of her voice. He held her firmly, but she fought with him, tore herself away and ran to the bedroom door.

A figure quickly retreated. Someone who had obviously been listening behind the door. The horrified Irene found herself staring at a lady who was a total stranger to her. Her dress was rather disarranged, and she hastily turned her face away. Irene’s lover, thinking her mad, had followed to restrain her and prevent any misfortune, but she was already on her way out of the bedroom again. “Excuse me,” she murmured. She felt utterly confused. She understood none of it, she felt nothing but endless revulsion and a great weariness.

“Excuse me,” she said again, seeing him look uneasily at her. “Tomorrow … tomorrow you’ll understand it all … that’s to say, I … oh, I don’t understand any of it myself any more.” She spoke to him as if he were a stranger. Nothing in this man reminded her that she had ever listened to a word he said, and she scarcely felt her own body. Now everything was even more confused than it had been. All she knew was that there must be a lie somewhere. But she was too tired to think any more, too tired to go on looking. With her eyes almost closed, she went down the steps like a condemned criminal going to the gallows.

The street was dark when she went out into it. Perhaps, the thought crossed her mind, she’s waiting outside now; perhaps all will be well at the last minute. She felt as if she ought to fold her hands and pray to her forgotten God. Oh, if she could just buy herself a few months, the few months between now and summer, and then spend the summer holiday peacefully in the country, where the blackmailer couldn’t get at her, living among the fields and meadows. Just one summer, but it would be so full, so complete that it would count as more than a whole human lifetime. She looked longingly down the now-dark street. She thought she saw someone standing in the entrance of a building, but as she came closer the figure retreated into the entrance hall. For a moment she thought she saw some similarity to her husband. It was the second time today that she had feared meeting him suddenly in the street with his eyes bent on her. She hesitated, hoping to make sure, but the figure had disappeared into the shadows. Uneasily, she went on with a curiously tense sensation at the nape of her neck, as if transfixed by a burning glance behind her. She turned around once, but there was no one in sight.

It was not far to the pharmacy. She went in, shivering slightly. The pharmacist took her prescription and went to make it up. In that one minute she absorbed the sight of everything in the shop—the shining scales, the delicate little weights, the small labels, and up on the shelves the rows of essences with their strange Latin names. Unconsciously, she looked along them all, spelling them out. She heard the clock ticking, breathed in the characteristic aroma of the place, that sweetish, greasy aroma of medicaments, and suddenly remembered that as a child she had always asked her mother to let her go and fetch anything from the pharmacy, because she liked the smell and the strange look of all the shiny little pots. At the same time she realised, horrified, that she had forgotten to say goodbye to her mother, and she felt dreadfully sorry for the poor woman. What a shock it would be to her, thought Irene in alarm, but the pharmacist was already counting out the colourless drops from a big-bellied vessel into a little blue bottle. She watched, spellbound, as the death that would soon be streaming through her veins moved from that larger vessel into the smaller one, and a chill ran though her. Mindlessly, in a kind of hypnotic trance, she watched his fingers as he put the stopper into the full bottle and stuck the label over its curving sides. All her senses were paralysed, numbed by the terrible idea.

“That’ll be two crowns, please,” said the pharmacist. She woke from her rigid calm, and looked around her strangely. Then she automatically put her hand in her bag to take out the money. Everything was still like a dream. She looked at the coins without recognising them at once, and involuntarily took her time about counting the money out.

At that moment she felt her arm pushed vigorously aside, and heard coins clinking as they were dropped into the glass dish on the counter. Beside her, a hand reached out and picked up the little bottle.

Instinctively, she turned, and her glance froze. It was her husband standing there, his lips tightly compressed. His face was pale, and damp beads of perspiration shone on his forehead.

She felt close to fainting, and had to hold on to the counter for support. All at once she realised that she had indeed seen him in the street earlier, and he had been waiting in the entrance to that building just now. Something in her had guessed that he was there. For a split second she wildly recollected the day’s events.

“Come along,” he said in a low, choked voice. She looked fixedly at him, and marvelled inside herself, at a very deep and dark level of her mind, for obeying him. And for the way her steps matched themselves to his without her knowing it.

They crossed the road side by side. Neither looked at the other. He was still carrying the little bottle. Once he stopped, and wiped his damp brow. She slackened her own pace too, not meaning to and unaware of it. But she dared not look at him. Neither spoke a word. The noise of traffic in the street surged between them.

On the steps outside their building, he let her go ahead of him. And as soon as he was no longer beside her, she began swaying as she walked. She stopped, and did not move on. Then he was supporting her arm. At the touch she started, and hurried up the last steps more quickly.

She went into the drawing room, and he followed her. The walls shone with a dark glow, the pieces of furniture could hardly be told apart. They still had not said a word. He tore the paper off the wrapping, opened the little bottle, and poured its contents away. Then he flung it violently into a corner. She shrank at the clattering sound as it fell.

Still they were silent. She felt him controlling himself, felt it without looking at him. At last he came over to her. Came close, and then very close. She could feel his heavy breathing, and with her fixed and clouded gaze she saw the glitter of his eyes standing out in the darkness of the room. She waited for his outburst of anger, shivering in spite of the firm grasp of his hand holding her. Irene’s heart stood still, only her nerves vibrated like the strings of a musical instrument at high tension. Everything in her was expecting chastisement, and she almost wanted to hear his fury. But he still said nothing, and with endless surprise she felt that his approach to her was gentle. “Irene,” he said, and his voice was strangely soft, “how much longer are we going to torment each other?”

Then it all broke out of her suddenly, convulsively and with overpowering force, like one great, mindless, animal scream. At last it burst out, all the sobbing she had suppressed and fought down in these last weeks. An angry hand seemed to grasp her from inside, shaking her hard, she was staggering as if she were drunk, and would have fallen to the floor if he had not supported her.

“Irene,” he soothed her, “Irene, Irene.” He spoke her name more and more softly, reassuringly, as if he could calm the desperate turbulence of her overstrained nerves by uttering it with increasing tenderness. But only sobs answered him, wild gasps and choking sounds of pain that passed through her whole body. He led, or rather carried, her convulsed form to the sofa and laid it down. But the sobbing would not stop. A fit of weeping shook her limbs like electric shocks, waves of shivering and cold seemed to run through her tortured body. Her nerves, which had been expecting the worst for weeks now, were torn apart, and the torment raged through her numbed body unchecked.

Greatly dismayed, he held her shuddering form, clasped her cold hands, kissed her dress and the back of her neck first soothingly, then wildly, in fear and passion, but the tremors still kept passing through her hunched figure as if something were tearing her apart. And the tumultuous wave of her sobbing, liberated at last, rose from inside her. He felt her face—cool, bathed in tears—and the throbbing veins at her temples. Unspeakable fear came over him. He knelt down so that he could speak closer to her face.

“Irene.” He kept touching her. “Why are you crying like that? It’s all over … all over now … why are you still tormenting yourself? You mustn’t be afraid any more. She’ll never come back, never again …”

Her body reared up again, but he held her firmly with both hands. He was afraid when he sensed the desperation tearing at her tormented body. It was as if he had murdered her. He kissed her again and again, stammering out words of apology.

“Never again … never. I swear it. How could I have known you’d take it so badly? I only wanted to … to bring you back to your duties here … get you to leave him … for ever, and come back to us. When I found out by chance, what else could I do? I couldn’t tell you myself … I thought, I kept thinking you’d come back … that’s why I sent that poor creature to hunt you down … and she really is a poor creature, an out-of-work actress. She was reluctant to agree, but I wanted … now I see it was wrong, but I did want you back. I’ve always shown you I was ready to … that I only wanted to forgive, but you didn’t understand. But I never … never meant to drive you so far … I’ve suffered so much seeing all this. I was watching every step you took … if only because of the children, you understand, I had to make you … it was because of the children … But it’s all over now, everything will be all right again now …”

Faintly, from an endless distance away, she heard words spoken close to her, but did not understand them. There was a roaring sound inside her that rose above everything else, a tumult of the senses in which all feeling was lost. She sensed touches on her skin, kisses, caresses, and her own tears, now cooling down, but the blood inside her was full of sound, full of a sombre, droning note that swelled powerfully and was now pealing like a thunderous chime of bells. And then everything distinct was lost. Coming round from her faint, still confused, she felt that she was being undressed, saw her husband’s face, kind and anxious, as if through dense clouds. Then she fell down into the dark, down into the long, black, dreamless sleep that she had needed for so long.

When she opened her eyes next morning, it was light and bright in her room. And she felt light and bright herself, the clouds had lifted, and her own blood felt cleansed as if by a thunderstorm. She tried to think what had happened to her, but it all still seemed like a dream. The throbbing inside her seemed improbable, light, liberated, like floating through spaces in sleep, and to make sure that she was not dreaming she tentatively felt her own hands.

Suddenly she came to herself with a start; her ring was back, sparkling on her finger. All at once she was wide awake. The confused words, heard and yet not heard while she was half-fainting, a sombre presentiment she had felt even earlier, but had never allowed to become real thought and suspicion, suddenly came together, showing a clear connection. All at once she understood everything—her husband’s questions, her lover’s baffled astonishment, the whole mesh was unravelled, and she saw the terrible net in which she had been entangled. Bitterness and shame overwhelmed her, once more her nerves began to quiver, and she was almost sorry to have woken from that calm and dreamless sleep.

Then she heard laughter in the next room. The children were up and about, noisily greeting the new day like birds waking up. She distinctly heard her son’s voice, and for the first time, surprised, realised how like his father he sounded. A quiet smile came to her lips, and rested there. She lay with her eyes closed to relish, at a deeper level, her real life or what it was, and it was now her happiness too. Something still hurt her, deep inside, but it was a promising pain, burning but mild, just as wounds burn when scar tissue is about to close over them for ever.

Among other Stefan Zweig titles published by

PUSHKIN PRESS

The World of Yesterday

Translated by Anthea Bell

Amok and Other Stories

Translated by Anthea Bell

Beware of Pity

Translated by Phyllis and Trevor Blewitt

Casanova

A Study in Self-Portraiture

Translated by Eden and Cedar Paul

Confusion

Translated by Anthea Bell

Twilight

Moonbeam Alley

Translated by Anthea Bell

Wondrak and Other Stories

Translated by Anthea Bell

Journey into the Past

Translated by Anthea Bell

Burning Secret

Translated by Anthea Bell

www.pushkinpress.com

Copyright

English translation © Anthea Bell

Fear first published in German as Angst 1920
© Williams Verlag Zurich

Print edition first published in 2010 by
Pushkin Press
12 Chester Terrace
London NW1 4ND

This ebook edition first published in 2011

ISBN 978 1 906548 56 8

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission in writing from Pushkin Press

Cover Woman at a Mirror c1906 Heinrich Kuhn
© Ackland Fund Chapel Hill

Frontispiece Stefan Zweig
© Roger-Viollet Rex Features

Set in 10.5 on 13.5 Baskerville MT

www.pushkinpress.com